


Is This Where It Gets Me?

by Dorkangel



Series: Thinking Past Tomorrow [1]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: All the warnings that apply to HILN if you've seen it, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Although I'm weak so most mentioned characters will be appearing, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon - Musical, Canon-Typical Violence, Characters will be added as they appear not as they're mentioned, Child Neglect, Child Soldiers, Disproportionate amounts of forests, Families of Choice, Father Figure Washington, Historical Inaccuracy, Homelessness, Horror, I am a friendly happy person WHY DO I WRITE THESE THINGS, Implied/Referenced Character Death, James Reynolds related abuse references, Look they're not the founding fathers they're the hamilton characters, M/M, Mild Gore, More references to death than a Moffat script, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Revolutionary War, TJeffs Hate, Trauma, World War III, how I live now - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-08 10:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 29,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5494598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the world came suddenly. After Britain dropped a bomb on the United States, the world began to go crazy, and a whole bunch of people were left behind: John Laurens, for one. With his family gone and America in ruins, he finds himself on the run from both terrorist and government forces with a group of teenage rebels under the command of the half-legendary General Washington.</p><p>*</p><p>From this prompt at Hamilton Prompts on tumblr:</p><p>'I watched ‘How I Live Now’ while listening to the Hamilton soundtrack… so what about a WW3/apocalyptic AU where the war with Britain is only happening now, in the 21st century, and the Hamilsquad (plus the Schuyler sisters and Burr and Jefferson and whoever, I guess) are teenagers thrown into it all under the command of Washington, just trying to survive.'</p><p>Now with a sequel!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. John

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I know nothing about American history other than what getting wrapped up in the Hamilton fandom will teach you. Sorry.
> 
> Also! This became more violent than I intended, so please be careful. I promise that I do /want/ to write happy things...
> 
> Edit 04/05/16: To anyone who can write me a better summary than the one I have ^^, I will write you a one-shot on any subject you want. Anything. Cheers.

The end of the world came suddenly. It did not creep up on them. The war did not gradually build until life became unliveable.

It had seemed that the war had always existed, just out of sight. People had been afraid of it for so long that they had almost stopped believing that it would actually happen, and the signs were there, if you knew how to look for them. Nothing overt, of course, but news anchors had real fear in their eyes as they reported terrorist strikes half the world away, teachers covered bomb drills with more vigour than technically necessary, the elderly talked about ‘last time’ and didn’t bother to qualify last time _what._

But when you grow up with that constant threat over you like a dark cloud, you stop noticing it. There didn’t seem to be anything unusual about the day the bomb hit: the sun shone, the birds sang, people went about their lives. And then from nowhere there was a blinding light, a rush of wind that flattened trees, and everyone within a mile of Washington D.C. was vaporised.

White flakes began to fall from the sky within seconds. Not snow, not in August.

Ash.

The sonic boom that rang out across the country was deafening, but the electricity was cut off, so it took a solid twenty four hours for the government to get on the airwaves and actually confirm that the nation’s collective worst nightmare was being realised.

_“At five p.m. today, Britain detonated a nuclear device on the United States of America. In this time of emergency, martial law will be enforced.”_

_(The end is nigh.)_

 

*

 

The Laurens family was one of the first to be evacuated – mainly because senator and billionaire Henry Laurens Senior was, y’know, a _senator_ and _billionaire_ – towards Eastern Canada. South Carolina is close enough to D.C. that there had been a kind of mass panic there the first few days, which had scared Mr. Laurens; also, it was close enough that the antebellum glass in the windows of the Laurens Mansion was blown out by the shockwave. And living with a non-functioning air conditioner and no windows was a no-go, even in the end of the world, so obviously the only thing to do was bundle the kids into a chauffeured government limo and demand free access to all the closed roads that would get them (relatively) safely away from the radioactive fallout.

Unfortunately, there was a slight hitch in the plan. ‘Small’ here being used to mean ‘massively huge’.

They set out the same day that British terrorists really mobilised and the war really, really hit. If the bomb was Pearl Harbour, this was the nightmarish Japanese invasion that was never realised – and ‘nightmare’ is the right word for it: it’s been months and John still wakes up gasping imaginary black smoke from his lungs. At four in the morning, they’d come to the third roadblock in an hour. John remembers holding Mary’s hand when she shuffled shyly back against him from the man asking for their I.Ds. The man’s voice was muffled behind a balaclava, and the memory’s blurry but that _might_ have been an English accent – John saw his dad stiffen, but at the time he’d just presumed it was a racism thing. The only reason John was back home in the first place was the scandal that had flared up over Senator Laurens transparent attempts to try and disown his only non-white, non-straight child (hey, it’s not John’s fault his dad, in a stunning moment of progressive not-bigoted-ness seventeen years ago that was apparently as brief as it’s confusing, slept with a Hispanic woman; and it’s actually hilarious to see his dad freak out when he brings boys home, so). It’s not that he didn’t _like_ the boarding school, in part at least because it was in Switzerland and therefore half the world away from his family, but, like, the point stands. He didn’t see the danger until it was too late. He just smiled awkwardly at the guard and handed over his and his sister’s passports. The guard had forced a smile back, looked them over for a long time, and then-

And then-

Well. He’s not actually sure what happened then. It seemed immediate, like there was no time at all between the guard glancing up with a new coldness in his eyes, the driver yelling for them to get down, and the gunshots. The car was bullet-proof, but not rocket-proof – on one hand, who the fuck builds a rocket-proof car, but on the other hand: why the _fuck_ aren’t there rocket-proof cars?! – and in the seconds it took John’s brain to start functioning again through the blind terror of _they’re shooting at us_ , they were lifting a rocket-launcher from the inside of the checkpoint cabin- and he moved without thinking. Just threw open his door and dove through it, pulling Mary after him and yelling for his brother, Henry, to run too, through the forest on either side of the road.

Two of the terrorists – or Brits? Or British terrorists? Or is it just guerrilla fighters, because John never paid attention in history or politics class and he doesn’t _know_ – started after them, and Mary was screaming, and it was dark, and then there was the second _BOOM_ they’d heard in a week. When he threw a glance over his shoulder, still running with her hand tight in his, he could see fire and smoke lighting up the morning, and then there were dark shapes charging towards them, and Mary fell, heavily, dragging him down with her.

“John!”

He remembers her shriek, remembers panicking and pulling himself off the ground and hurtling forwards again, but that’s it. There’s a blind spot for what must have been two entire days of his thus far short life, and then he remembers numbly forcing his back door open, jamming it shut with a chair, and collapsing onto his still glass-strewn bed. The neighbourhood is deserted – gated community, it’s a fucking gated community, because he was stupidly rich, alright? – the same as most of the city. Not because of the government evacuations. There hadn’t been time: the terrorists stormed in, so people fled or died.

Is his dad dead? He doesn’t know. He honestly has no idea. The man was in a car that _exploded_ , but the Brits hadn’t seemed to be aiming to kill John or his half-siblings-

Is Mary still alive? Is Henry? They were both out of the car, but how could he have abandoned them? What kind of person is he that he can go on living without knowing if they’re okay, barely caring that his own father might have been blown into little pieces? He’s the oldest, he’s meant to take care of them...

How he lives with it is that, for the next three months, he doesn’t dare to think. He rations food from the helpfully extravagant cupboards, the irony that his family’s obnoxious habit of buying in bulk and wasting half of it is finally coming in useful not lost on him. After that, he’s forced to go outside, a scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth like it’ll magically protect him from the fallout he’s been breathing in this whole time anyway. (John doesn’t _feel_ sick, but this far from ground zero surely it’ll take time for radiation poisoning to set it? Or is he just in denial?)

The town’s a mess. The _world_ ’s a goddamn mess.

In retrospect, it would’ve been smarter to steal from his neighbours’ kitchens than to try and go to the grocery store: the shelves are trashed, there’s barely anything left, and it means he’s exposed. Shots ring out in the empty air, not that far away, and he tears down the road to get home.

Three months since they tried to leave, almost exactly. He spends ninety days like that, with nothing to do but sit in his room listening to the radio and watch the batteries of everything he owns die one by one. It’s the most alone that John has ever felt, as though he’s the only person left alive on the surface of the Earth.

“Civil law has been suspended,” says the eerily calm voice of the government’s official broadcast, for the millionth time. “You are advised to stay calm and remain inside. Citizens of the following states should evacuate as quickly as possible: Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina...”

The list expanded every day for the first half a month or so, and then the Brits redoubled their attacks and it began to loop. ( _There mustn’t be anyone left to update it,_ John thinks, and then wishes he hadn’t.) He stops being able to listen, digs candles out of the attic and draws by their weak light, his sketchpad resting on his knees. He’s covered as many windows as possible with cardboard, taping or thumbtacking it to the frames.

John’s not sure what he’s waiting for, but he keeps waiting.

And then it’s the ninetieth night and everything changes again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More to come! Also, Lams. They're just so gay, I don't make the rules people.


	2. Alexander and Lafayette

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who's the enemy? Who's fighting who? What's going on?  
> Well, who knows. I'd like to say the vagueness is deliberate, but the truth is that it's more like... I'm using the vagueness of How I Live Now as an excuse for my own lack of knowledge about an actual war.

“ _Merde_ , it’s like a ghost town.”

Lafayette’s voice is incomprehensibly muffled, but so loud next to his ear that Alexander jumps away. For a moment he thought- well, never mind what he thought, but his heart is thundering in his chest and he has to take a few seconds to calm down before he snaps back.

“Dude, I can not hear you over the mask. It’s not like it’s going to save you, Laf’, take it off.”

With a glare, the younger boy pulls his gas mask over his head and throws a middle finger up at his friend. The street is empty except for three cars, all of which have shuffled off the mechanical coil, as it were. The furthest one down the street is a burnt out wreck, the closest one is crashed into someone’s garbage can. They could walk on the sidewalk, but, somehow, it feels right to occupy the space of the road.

“I said it’s like a ghost town, Alex.”

Neither of them flinch at the distant gunfire that almost cuts off Lafayette’s last word, of course. Or they wouldn’t admit to it, if they did- which they didn’t. And neither of them bother to point out that the ghost town _is_ populated, just only by soldiers and Brits and bullets, because they both know. It doesn’t really matter anyway. By experience, they both know that the troops are way too busy to put much effort into chasing down a couple of homeless scavenger kids unless the aforementioned kids get in their way (or they mistake them for terrorists, which is probably the second closest Alexander has ever gotten to death after the fever that killed his mother: the barrel of a gun pressing down painfully at the base of his neck, Lafayette babbling in broken English that they’re not spies, please, they’re _really not, please don’t shoot._..).

“Filthy rich ghost town, though, isn’t it?” Alexander grins. It’s forced, but fuck if Laf’s going to call him out on it. “They’re going to be the same kind of stupid you were.”

“Pantries full of food, _oui_?”

“ _Oui, mon ami._ People who live around places like here don’t think to take it with them.”

The only reason that they choose the Laurens house is that there’s no need to force an entry. One or two of the upstairs windows has been hastily covered up, but other than that they’re glassless and bare, easy to clamber through.

Alexander tries not to be, but he’s kind of disturbed at how adept Lafayette has become at breaking and entering. The first time they did this he had to boost the kid up to get him through, had to wrap his hands so that he didn’t get cut, had to be the one to bandage it up when Laf’ inevitably nicked his fingers anyway – he made some dumb joke about kissing it better that he gotten glared at over for _hours_ – and tell him to be quiet literally every two seconds; now, Lafayette knows all too well. It’s almost sad. The kid’s only fourteen, which admittedly is two years older than Alex was when he was on the streets for the first time, but still too young. Especially considering that they met _before_ the bomb.

Lafayette still talks too much, though. That hasn’t changed.

“’Ey, Alex, _qu’en pensez vous-_ ”

“Shut up.” he hisses, grabbing his friend’s arm to stop him from pocketing shiny objects as they look for a kitchen. Place like this, it’s either going to be hidden away downstairs or some horrifically modern extension.

He doesn’t even have to flick his flashlight back to sense the eye-roll Lafayette sends his way. It’s a Gallic thing.

“Who’s going to hear us?” groans the younger boy, making no effort at all to speak softly. “We’re in an empty house, on an empty street, in an empty-”

Something shifts upstairs, the floor creaks painfully loudly, and both of them freeze. Alexander’s hand tightens around his torch – for fuck’s sake, there was a fucking _reason_ he told Laf’ to shut up, but it’s too late for that now – and he wishes the American soldiers who captured them a couple of weeks back hadn’t taken their guns, not for the first time. Lafayette’s face has gone pale, and Alexander’s reminded sickeningly that he’s sixteen, he’s the closest thing to an adult in their relationship. There’s a duty of care here. He’s _responsible_.

“ _Quand je dis cours, cours_ _.”_ he snaps, pulling his arm so that they’re facing each other. Sure, Lafayette’s still taller than him, stronger, but he learned to fight with private boxing lessons. Alex learned to fight on the streets: he’s ruthless, and he knows it. No point fighting by the rules when you’re five foot four.

 _“_ _Mais_ _-”_

 _“_ _Juste_   _fais_ _-le!”_

The younger boy’s dark eyes scan his face for a moment before he nods reluctantly. “ _Oui_ _, Alexandre._ ”

Alexander has spent a lot of time training himself to ignore his instincts, rely on solid logic. It’s because of this that he moves up the stairs and not down, that he doesn’t falter in his steady, cautious steps when he feels Lafayette’s hand slip back into his and hold too tight, nervously, almost painfully tight and sweaty.

“Alex-”

“Shh.”

There’s light, however faint, emanating from the door at the end of the upstairs hall. When Alexander takes the first step towards it, the floor bows with a high groan; it must be what made the noise earlier. Neither of the boys think that, though, because Lafayette is too busy going stock-still again and Alexander is too busy pulling him forwards. A shadow draws closer as they do – they can see it under the door – and Alexander can’t think anything but _is this where I die, after surviving everything else?,_ can’t hear anything but his own heartbeat and Lafayette murmuring _“_ _S’il te plaît, Dieu,_ _”_ and allows himself a moment of amusement that Laf’ thinks he, of all people, is on good enough terms with the Almighty to use the informal, before-

The handle turns slowly and the door opens just a sliver. It’s not enough to see much of the person behind it, other than that he can’t be much older than they are. He thinks he glimpses curls for a second, beyond the freckles and worried eyes of the face staring back at them.

The boy behind the door begins to speak, and they hold their breath to await their fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:
> 
> Quand je dis cours, cours - If I say run, run
> 
> Mais - But
> 
> Juste, fais-le! - Just do it!
> 
> S'il te plaît, Dieu - (Informal version of please) Please, God


	3. John

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ternary format! Don't you just love it? It's going to go A-B-A, C-D-C, B-A-B, D-C-D. Which will make sense in the future more than it does now, hopefully.

He had been reading when he first heard the noise. If anything, the firefights in the city had been seeming to get further and further away – but that doesn’t mean that whoever won the firefights can’t have moved back up this way. He _thinks_ he trusts the army, if they find him, to get him out, but what if it’s the Brits? What if it’s a rebel terrorist group?

The noise is a pair of twin thuds, as though it was Mary jumping down the stairs. But it’s not Mary. If Mary’s even still alive she's further south, in a cell somewhere, with a price on her head and danger on every side.

It’s not until he hears a voice from downstairs that he actually remembers how to breathe. ‘ _Alex, what do you think’_ someone is saying, in French, which he doesn’t know what to think about. France and Britain are only separated by a tiny little stretch of sea, after all, but then again the speaker could be Canadian, or something, or, or-

John has to mentally force himself to stand up and tiptoe out onto the hallway, listening for more noise. Maybe if they don’t know he’s here they’ll leave him alone.

It’s only be a couple of months since he got back from Switzerland, and for a solid chunk of that he’s been completely isolated from other human beings. It’s because of this that he forgets that the floorboard about a foot away from the top of the stairs screeches like a demon straight from hell, and is apt to alert everybody within the house that there’s someone moving around upstairs. He really should have remembered: the carpet around the edges is all scuffed up, from him and Mary and Henry going around it so as not to be heard.

The talking downstairs stops abruptly and John darts back into his room, desperately trying to think of what to do. He could go out the window, maybe, but-

Whoever they are, they move quickly. He hears them coming up the stairs from behind the door, and backs off until he’s at the centre of the bare room in his socks, his hair a mess around his shoulders and his heart pounding.

“Alex-” someone whispers.

“Shh.” someone else replies.

The first of the two voices sounds scared. Young, kind of. John steels himself with a shaky breath and moves slowly forward again, gently laying his hand on the handle. There’s a kind of tiger by the tail disassociation going on. It feels more like a half-forgotten memory than what’s actually happening right now.

 _Please, god,_ the French voice mutters, and he turns it downwards and puts his eye up to the crack. Outside of his room there’s barely any light but what comes in through the shattered skylight – yeah, John could have swept that up, but who was there to care whether he did or not? – and all that’s visible for a moment is two silhouettes. The closest one is small, their t-shirt hanging off their shoulders and their jeans off their hips; the other is taller and more filled out, but hanging back and apparently only held in place by the hand clasped in theirs. When John glances down he sees a long dark shape, and a jolt of fear runs through him.

“I have a gun.” he blurts. God, it comes out way too much like a question, and his voice cracks halfway through and trembles slightly thereafter. He doesn’t have a gun: they’re locked away in a safe under his dad’s bed, which he doesn’t know the password to anyway. Besides, he’s against gun violence- Or, he was. Before the war and everything.

“We don’t.”

How the hell does the kid on the other side keep their voice so level? They’re not the French one, and John’s pretty sure they’re male at this point, but who knows. Surely it’s not normal to stay so calm when someone in a warzone says they have a deadly weapon? Unless they know he’s bluffing, that is.

He jumps when their thumb moves and something clicks, but for no reason. They weren’t lying. The long, dark object in their hand is a torch, and the beam of light that moves over John’s face for barely a second illuminates a sight that’s relieving in its raggedness. Even the independent little groups of terrorists aren’t such a mess as the two boys in front of him: their clothes are falling apart, their faces are dirty, their hair is unwashed. There’s deep circles under the eyes of the boy closest to him, and blood in the wildly curly hair of the one furthest away.

But, still. They’ve invaded his home, and they’re all still in the middle of a battlefield. He forces himself to put some threat in his voice when he speaks again.

“What are you doing here?”

The boy in front of him inclines his head thoughtfully, and for a moment John catches a glimpse of what seems to be non-stop machinations behind the dark eyes of the kid standing in front of him, whirring cogs in his mind. _Has this guy shot anything before?_ he seems to be thinking. _Who is he? Is there anyone else in there? Did he live here before the war? Where’s his family?_

The couple of seconds that they spend in that manner, paused and with their gazes locked, stretches far too long. The younger boy pushes his companion out of the way and takes a careful step towards John to answer for him.

“Looking for food, _monsieur_.” There’s a slight pause as all three teenagers hesitate simultaneously, and then he starts again. “We thought it was unoccupied- we could go, if you-”

John blinks in surprise and opens the door a little bit wider so they can both see his expression of shock and horror, completely forgetting that he’s meant to have a gun, like, within reach. The deadly combination of a etiquette-heavy boarding school and South Carolinianness is screaming _Host! Give food!_ and his general human compassion is also drowning them out with _that could be me_ and he’s really not thinking straight.

“Christ, no, I have food-” They’re both staring at him, and he curses inwardly as he realises his mistake. “Um.”

Damn. Logic. Threat. Make sense. Act as though they’re both dangerous, like they could both try and kill you at any point, because even if they’re not going to they definitely _could_...

“You’re on your own, right?” he asks, his brain scrambling for any remaining scraps of dignity. If they’re with anyone, terrorists or rebels or military, he-

Well. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if they are: he just hopes they’re not.

“Completely. Yes.” nods the first boy frantically, and for the first time John sees the thin veil of calm slide off his face and reveal the utter distress underneath. The kid must be as scared as he is.

“No one.” agrees the second, letting his friend catch hold of his hand again. Their accent is becoming more pronounced, to the point where John isn’t even surprised when he accidentally slips into French. “ _Seulement Alexandre. Nous ne sommes pas avec quelquun d’autre – nous sommes orphelins._ ”

John can’t respond showing off and responding in kind, with the French he’d learned abroad, because he’s kind of good at languages.

“ _Avant ou après la guerre?_ ”

“Before.” cuts the first. He seems guarded, and John flushes red. It’s not like it’s really any of his business, anyway, and it’s got to be personal- he should just stop thinking.

“My name’s John.” He steps out awkwardly from behind the door as he says it, pushing his hair out of his eyes ad completely dropping the pretence of having a gun. Neither of them mention it, thank God. “John Laurens. This is-” _was_ “-my father’s house.”

“Alexander.” says the first boy shortly, and, yeah, John remembers hearing ‘Alex’ and ‘Alexandre’ getting thrown about in the second one’s accent, so he’s not lying. No last name- not that it matters.

“Lafayette.” adds the second, just as curt, but then grins. “The rest of my name is a little too long for conversation, yes?”

Alexander huffs and cautiously lets John shuffle past him. “Don’t get me started on your name, it gives me a headache.”

“ _C’est pas de ma faute!_ I was, how you say, excessively rich. They give you many names then, for some reason.”

His babbling comes with a note of giddy relief, and even though the other boy (Alexander, or Alex, John reminds himself) shoots back at him just as easily, John still feels two pairs of eyes boring into the back of his head as he leads them downstairs. They’re still on guard. As he should be, come to think of it.

It’d be way too simple to forget what this is – a war – and he can’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Seulement Alexandre. Nous ne sommes pas avec quelquun d’autre – nous sommes orphelins.” - Only Alexander. We aren't with anyone else - we're orphans.
> 
> Avant ou après la guerre - Before or after the war?
> 
> C'est pas de ma faute! - It's not my fault!


	4. Hercules and Aaron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here the child endangerment/child soldiers bit happens. Be safe guys x

“Mulligan!”

Shit- _shit._ Before all this, Hercules never thought he’d _resent_ the ability to sleep standing up. Unfortunately, though, all that it’s come to is that he keeps dropping off in the middle of his drills.

The soldiers on either side of him are both adults, were both soldiers _before_ , and the only way you keep alive in the army right now is to be either mean as hell or lucky as hell. They’re big enough for his assessment to lean towards the former rather than the latter – as in, he’s getting zero help from either of them. One of them even smirks as the commander strides closer. Bastard.

“Am I boring you, Mulligan?”

 _Yes,_ he thinks bitterly, lowering his eyes. Commander Lee is an idiot, but he’s also a paranoid idiot who’s alarmingly alert to dissention in his troops. _Of course I’m bored. We’re going through the meaningless ceremonial B.S. for the millionth time, and then you’re going to drop us on the front line without any training again and call a retreat once we’ve been massacred._

Out loud, he mumbles, “No, sir.”

“ ‘No, sir’?”

How’s he meant to respond to that? Agreeing or disagreeing would give Lee a chance to fly off the handle, which’d probably make the dude’s day. He stays quiet.

Lee starts shouting and Hercules tunes out, gazing longingly at his trousers. They’re a mess, of course – the entire U.S. Military is running on empty, and new uniforms for an emergency cannon-fodder unit is light years down the priorities list – but the stitching over the holes is neat, and he wonders who fixed them up. Someone’s wife or something, probably, which is all misogynist stereotypical and shit, amateur yet careful and practiced.

Hercules really, really wanted to be tailor. The University of Oregon had accepted him for textile arts next year, which would have been awesome, and even if he hadn’t liked it there was a costuming shop he did his work experience at that offered him an apprenticeship, and he would have made the most _insanely_ pretty clothes of, like, all time...

But then the bomb happened.

People ask ‘ _Where were you?’_ sometimes, just as casual gallows conversation, and mean ‘ _When the world ended what were you doing?_ ’. They don’t usually believe him when he reluctantly has to admit, “I slept through it.” Finals happened, he was tired, he napped in the middle of the day. So what? Nothing surprising on any other day, a sleep-deprived teenager – even if New York had been close enough to Ground Zero that the shockwave had the same impact as your average earthquake.

Hercules is just kind of a deep sleeper.

Wait, what? It’s gone quiet - oh. Lee’s paused for breath, all red face and flying spittle. Gross. He lets his eyes wander towards the edges of the courtyard, the high walls, the metal gates. All tall figure slips out of the General’s tent and watches silently, because of course they would, it’s Aaron Burr. Hercules and Aaron don’t have beef or anything – not generally, anyway, because even if Aaron’s a total slime ball half the time he avoids conflict like the plague – but he’s got a dude yelling right in face and he’s not in the best mood right now. The passivity can be annoying if you’re in the set of mind to get annoyed.

He first met Aaron pretty early on in the war, in the weeks it took the army to start evacuating the major cities. Kid’s a super genius, or something like that – attended college when he was thirteen, would’ve gone when he was eleven if they’d let him. Unfortunately, since his parents died he’s apparently had this weird attitude of remaining neutral on all subjects, under all circumstances, not giving away personal information unless he knows it can’t be used against him. Maybe if he’d been looking after himself before the war it’d make sense, but he was rich, so it really doesn’t. Whatever it is, he keeps it to himself.

Doesn’t take shit, though. Hercules would swear that Aaron almost had the Marine who had lined up all the kids on their street in tears, making this terrifying speech at him in low tones. It was so quiet that Herc couldn’t really hear it, but it was something about it ‘living with the guilt’ of what he was about to do, and by the looks of it it really got under the guy’s skin. How Aaron had any idea what they were about to do, he doesn’t know, but somehow he did.

Aaron had a girlfriend too, he remembers, who he’d fought to get to when the Marine snapped and grabbed him, and he’d yelled when they pulled Hercules away from his brother. “How old are you?” they’d barked, and dragged Herc, Aaron, and a couple of other older boys towards a truck. That should’ve been a warning sign on its own, he guesses, but they were all scared and not thinking straight. Next thing any of them knew, they were all officially troops, whether they wanted to be or not. For most of them it was a decisive _not._

Now that he thinks of it, half the reason the walls around their base are so high has got to be to keep the child soldiers in, never mind keeping the British out. (If the British gave a damn, they’d all have been blasted into little pieces by now.) It’s the same reason Hercules and Aaron are locked in their bunk at night, why he’s not allowed a sewing needle to fix up his ill-fitting uniform, why they’re not trained with guns even though they’re going to get dumped into combat.

“Are you listening to me, soldier?!” bellows Lee, jolting him back to reality and the base in question. It’s somewhere around Savannah, he thinks, but he’s not sure. They won’t tell him.

Aaron probably knows, but Aaron doesn’t tell him shit. Hey – speaking of Burr, he’s sending Hercules a sympathetic grimace. He’s not all bad.

“Not really.” Hercules says, squaring his shoulders and looking Lee straight in the eye, and for the first time since someone decided he was old enough to fight he’s grateful for his bulk. His parents didn’t call him _Hercules_ for no reason.

Lee turns purple, but it’s worth it. He also drags him into the fort building by the collar of his uniform, screaming the whole time- who cares anyway. Every officer in this place knows that Hercules has ‘rebel sympathies’ – as in, he’s supporting the American militias going up against... well, everyone else – and Aaron would sell out literally everyone he knows for enough political leverage.

It’s only a matter of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything is going to be connected. Everything is connected. Or, it will be. I promise (I hope).


	5. Angelica, Eliza, Peggy

It’s not the first time Angelica’s woken up to the smell of burning, but today, somehow, it doesn’t spark the usual panic for more than a millisecond. The most poignant memory it summons is that of the ash that had come floating down from the previously cloudless sky like hellish snow, on the day of the bomb; then, worse, her parents’ house aflame and the sensation of a hastily packed bag thudding against her back with every step that she ran from it, the sound of Eliza’s crying; and finally, the fainter and more distant image of a bonfire and smores on a camping holiday years ago, back when the war had seem foreign and far away and unimportant. Maybe the reason today’s smoke doesn’t scare her as much as it ought to is that it’s a lot more like the last memory than the first two.

When she rolls over sleepily, she can see a red-faced and guilty Peggy throwing a bucket of river water over the smoking, fizzling frying pan balanced on their little cooking fire. As per every morning this week, there’s twigs and rotting leaves in her hair and mud somehow _inside_ her sleeping bag; once upon a time, she’d been the school queen bee, every strand of hair perfectly in its place and nails filed down to deadly points.

Once upon a time gets longer ago every day now.

“She was just trying to do breakfast.” whispers Eliza from Angelica’s right, and she glances over her shoulder to where her sister is lying on her elbows and undoing her haphazard plaits, then looks back to Peggy and her efforts to put out the charred remains of breakfast. She can’t help but sigh.

“We can’t use that pan now. You know that, right?”

Peggy stares at the bucket in confusion, up again, and then-

“Oh!”

Suddenly understanding, she throws it away from her, spilling its contents all across the grass and wiping her hands frantically on her dress. The water isn’t safe: that message is carved onto their hearts, written in blood on the tent walls of the makeshift hospital where they’d taken shelter a while ago. Half of the patients in there had been hit by the same bombs and shells that had rained down fire on their home, by Brits or the loony extremists, but the other half were vomiting and choking on their air because of the water. _You can’t drink tap water or anything out of a stream. The water is poison. The terrorists polluted the water._

“We’ll boil it.” Eliza objects quietly, and Angelica represses a snort.

“That doesn’t make it safe and you know it.”

“It’s not like we’re going to drink out of it.” Peggy snaps, peevish. Angelica drops the subject, wriggles out of her bed to look more closely at their surroundings, and starts brushing out her hair with her fingers while she thinks. They’re still under the leafy cover of someone’s orchard, fairly far away from the river, and although there’s a chance that somehow this water is clean (none of the trees have died, have they?) she’s not risking it. But for the sizzle of the pan and what she suspects used to be bacon, nothing seems to have changed since she went to sleep; God, even the smoke is making her hungry. Eliza and Peggy get enough to eat every day, Angelica makes sure of it, but the last time she went anywhere near a mirror her cheeks were pinched, the bones of her face prominent. And Peggy just wasted a meal – it’s not her fault, of course. She was just trying to help, she’s the baby of the family, two years younger than Eliza and three years younger than Angelica.

“I’ll help you smother it.” she offers eventually, a peace offering to her youngest sister, because she knows Peggy feels – used to feel – a little ignored. Now who is there to ignore her? Mom and Dad are- They’re-

_Stop thinking about it._

The wind is the only sound not coming from their tiny camp: it’s possible, theoretically, that they’re being watched by someone in camouflage or something, but she knows really that they’re alone. Savannah’s not too far away, and usually there’d be the noise of the highway and all the traffic at the very least. But it’s silent.

“We’ve got a message from Washington.” hums Eliza gently. She’s the softest out of all of them, the most careful, so much so that Angelica sometimes forgets how dangerous she can be. Eliza’s the one who carries the gun as well as the satellite phone. “He says, so long as we haven’t seen anything worth investigating, we should move. There’s a U.S. base a couple of miles north of here, apparently.”

Angelica has to blink back surprise. “Really?”

“They’re being _quiet_.” Peggy puts in, just as shocked. “What do you think they’re doing?”

“Must be training, or something.” says Eliza, and the two older girls exchange a meaningful glance, saying _don’t tell her_. The most recent group of refugees Washington brought through were looking for their children, whisked away by the army to ‘safety’ – what Eliza said wasn’t so much a lie as a small untruth. They’ll be training kids as young as their baby sister, some places, and the worst part is that they won’t be training them _enough_. Angelica remembers – on an expedition they did without Peggy – stumbling onto an old battlefield, seeing those young faces staring up at the sky, and throwing up. Eliza was brave enough to hold her hair back from her face and lead her away from it without reacting: that doesn’t undo the memory of Eliza crying onto her shoulder later, though.

(Their father was a general before the world went mad- it’s got to be why they weren’t taken. She can’t think of any other reason.)

So, no, Peggy doesn’t know. And they’re not about to tell her.

“We could move closer and see if anything happens...?” Peggy suggests, tucking a curl behind her ear hesitantly. “Maybe we could pretend we needed shelter, they’d have to-”

“ _No_.”

Angelica’s voice is unexpectedly sharp, more so than she intended, and Peggy looks wounded.

“We can’t go in there.”

“Don’t stress it,” Eliza tempers her sister’s steel with softness, as usual. “It’s not a bad idea. We just can’t. We’ll have to move past it, anyway.”

When Angelica inclines her head curiously, out of Peggy’s eyesight as she bends to gather her sleeping bag, Eliza forces a smile and mouths _not too close_.

Maybe it’s cliched, but she loves her sisters more than anything else in the world. She’s not going to let anything happen to them, no matter what happens with this base.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AGH NOTHING HAPPENED IN THIS CHAPTER. They are headed towards stuff happening, though.


	6. Hercules and Aaron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Desiree_Harding :)

Aaron, although he’d dance around the subject if you asked him, is really, really smart. He remembers a young man at college – Seabury, he thinks – asking in a bitter kind of tone whether he ever got bored of telling people how intelligent he is. Stupid question. Aaron never reveals _exactly_ how intelligent he is: it would scare people.

It’s because of this that he has a (very unofficial) position as an assistant on the base, instead of being stuck in drills like Hercules. He knows it won’t keep him safe, but it’s useful at least for information. His mother was a genius, even more so than he is, and she always said that the best place to be is next to the richest man (Aaron has always had a sneaking suspicion that the reason she married his father was that he was the richest man, actually), which in this case is General Montgomery. The man resents being forced to run such a shoddy base as this, resents that over half the soldiers he sends out come back in body bags or not at all. He resents it so much that he vents at Aaron sometimes, and Aaron hears very clearly that Montgomery doesn’t think either of their chances are very good either, right in the silence between the words.

Aaron feels he’s being underestimated, just a little bit. He’d never say it out loud, though. If Montgomery were actually concerned for his young aide’s safety – if he was actually a _decent human being_ , the repressed, emotional end of Aaron yells – he’d take his name off the list of men destined for the next combat, and, well, he hasn’t. The weird thing is that he’s not actually sure if he _wants_ his name off that list, because he’s not sure if he’d be able to go on if he knew Hercules was thrown onto the front line without him and...

The weird thing is that, even though Aaron obfuscates and tries his best not to show any kind of emotion, Hercules seems to developed this relationship with him. It’s probably just the trauma speaking, but they’re _friends_. They’ve been through the same thing, they’re both looking to escape, and Aaron’s pretty sure Hercules would take him with him.

(He’s not so sure if he’d do the same. It’s not a good feeling.)

The fact that Hercules openly supports the rebels is becoming a bit of a problem, since the kid has biceps roughly the size of breezeblocks and it’s making the commanders jumpy – which is ridiculous, really, because he wants to make clothes, not fight, and he just happened to enjoy working out – but Aaron can work around it. He thinks. He’s got the bones of a plan.

The same evening that Herc manages to get under Lee’s skin, Aaron’s nervous as he’s lead back to their cell. (It’s not a bunk, what’s the point of calling it that? It’s a cell.) When he steps over the threshold the other boy is studying his jacket with something like disgust.

“What’s up?” he asks, gently putting the jacket down on the cot next to him and pretending he doesn’t see Aaron try and failing not to jump at the heavy metallic clunk of the bolt being thrown across the door after him.

“The damp concrete roof?”

Hercules laughs, but then frowns harder at the worried pitch of Aaron’s voice, and asks again, more gravely. “Nah, man. Seriously. What’s up?”

His head is spinning, it feels kind of faint – Aaron sits heavily on his own cot to stop himself from falling.

“Montgomery told me,” he begins hesitantly. “Precisely when we’re getting sent off to get shot.”

“ _When_?”

“Two days.” If it sounds cold, it’s not his fault. There’s horror creeping across Hercules’s face and the only way Aaron knows around this is to shove it into a little mental box and pretend it doesn’t matter to him: the next words out of his mouth have the sort of eerie calm to them as a mirror. “We’re going to die.”

“We’re going to die, man. And no one’s going to fucking know.”

He, at least, has the grace to be furious. Is it weird that Aaron feels kind of relieved by it?

“Herc,” he starts, then cuts off, unsure of what he was planning to say. Outside, the floodlights flicker off one by one and leave them blinded by the utter darkness.

“Uh huh?”

“We’ve got tomorrow to get out.”

There’s a slight sigh, a rustle of metal and fabric that is Hercules’s bulky form turning over on his bare bed, and then eventually a reply.

“I know.”

*

The next day begins much as every day the previous two months have: they startle half out of their beds at the five o’clock alarm, drudge to what may theoretically be a mess hall but in practice is just kind of a couple of picnic tables under a corrugated iron sheet, and attempt to eat the same thick porridge that appears every morning. It’s... nourishing, at least?

“What are you doing today?” Hercules whispers, in the brief pause as they both try not to gag at the texture and tastelessness of the ‘food’. Talking is vaguely discouraged, but no one’s going to stop them. Aaron only shrugs, thinking through the mental itinerary he’s constructed – hover around Montgomery, try to read any information over Montgomery’s shoulder, files some papers, probably get yelled at at some point, pass on some coded orders to Commander Lee – and finding nothing worth mentioning.

“The same as usual, I guess.”

They both lower their eyes as Lee passes by; Herc because the man’s already got it out for him, Aaron because there’s no point aggravating authority figures without cause. The appearance of him clearly sends both their minds in the right direction, though, because Hercules leans forward and asks exactly what Aaron’s thinking.

“How are we going to do it?”

Aaron _doesn’t know_. That’s the scariest thing, that he just doesn’t know: he thought he’d have more time to think than this one last day, but he didn’t and now it looks as though any real chance they ever had has gone to hell along with the rest of the world, the 'plan' he could have had dissipating in the night.

It’s lucky, then, that Aaron thinks quickly, because he doesn’t have time to answer anyway.

They’ve experienced several attacks recently, mostly by aircraft flying by and blitzing the surrounding forest ‘just in case’, but in comparison to the usual yelling and frantic panic this one begins quietly. Just outside the shelter they hear the slap of rapid footsteps against the ground, a faint shout, then again and louder, audibly:

“Get down! Run!”

Aaron and Hercules hesitate all of a second, exchanging a glance, but that’s all the time it takes. All of a sudden there’s an explosion that seems to skew the entire world sideways, that makes their ears ring and knocks them out of their seats.

“We’re being bombed!” booms the closest commander, which quite frankly seems a little redundant. Another strike hits and Aaron feels his teeth jar painfully, followed almost immediately by another sharp pain as Hercules tugs him underneath their bench with him.

“Now?” hisses the other boy, and Aaron nods in sudden understanding.

“Definitely now. It _has_ to be now.”

They both dive out from underneath the table, scrambling out of the mess hall and into the chaos of the courtyard. Whoever’s firing on them must be far away, because Aaron can’t see anything in the sky, but the ground is intermittently blowing up and sending the pair of tumbling skittishly from side to side as they rush towards the gates. There’s a man huddled next to them, presumably meant to be guarding, but Hercules just barrels past him and Aaron turns to yell, “General’s orders!” over his shoulder, because everyone knows he works for Montgomery.

“Wait!”

They don’t listen, of course, and by the time Aaron catches up his friend is kicking the lock. If it was anyone else it’d probably take maybe a week to break it down – but, well, Hercules is pretty strong. The lock bends at the first kick, breaks on the second, and Aaron wonders how quickly they must have thrown this base together from what must have been little more than a historical monument in the past. Weird to think that the forest on the other side of the gate doesn’t come with the rush of adrenaline Aaron thought their escape would bring. Just the same blind instincts of _run, get away,_ the same feeling of helplessness.

Eventually, though, the sounds of the base and explosions fade away. Hercules is still in front of him, because of course he is, he’s _huge_ , and they’re both running, and everything is going fine and he can’t quite believe it. Aaron’s never done anything with this little prior planning in his entire life. Strangely, he thinks he likes the feeling of reckless exhilaration it brings, even though maybe in future he’ll try and avoid warzones. Somehow.

He’s about to voice the thought to Hercules when the world suddenly shatters into shades of fire and pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cliff....
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> ...hanger


	7. John, Alexander, Lafayette

 

The two boys eat kind of as though they’re starving – which John really, really doesn’t want to give any more thought than he needs to. The first thing that either of them had done, when he turned on the faucet, had been to yell and frantically switch it off, staring at him like he was nuts.

Apparently there’s something wrong with most people’s tap water, but he’s been drinking his for months. It settles a deep kind of ache in his gut that the sensible part of him dismisses as psychosomatic, and the constantly panicking part of him assumes is a harbinger of _literal death._

Awkward as always in social situations, he perches on the kitchen countertop and watches out of the corner of his eyes, but they don’t seem to notice. Or if they do, they don’t care. Eventually, though, he clears his throat and has to speak. It’s been too quiet over the last months not to.

“Where are you two from?”

Lafayette snorts as though to say _Where do you think?_ , and continues shovelling John’s stolen pot noodles into his mouth. Alexander swallows carefully, then looks up.

He glances curiously at John for a moment, almost as though he’s seeing him for the first time; by the time he speaks John’s face is as red as a tomato and feels he’s given away more information that he’s going to gain.

“Nevis.” John blinks in surprise and Alexander sends a truly withering stare his way, like he’s exhausted himself telling people this over and over. “It’s in the Caribbean, near-”

“I know.” he says, then feels bad for interrupting – but if anything, Alexander just looks pleasantly surprised. “How’d you end up here?”

“Got on a plane.” he shoots back dismissively, turning to his food again. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“Tell ‘im when you arrived.” murmurs Lafayette around a full mouth.

Alexander laughs bitterly. “Oh, yeah. I arrived on American soil about five weeks Before. How shitty is that?”

“ _Christ_.”

“My grandfather sent me to the States to get me away from the war, that’s even _worse_.” Lafayette puts in with this unforced but this unforced but strange grin. He’s not smiling because he’s happy: he’s smiling because of some half-forgotten social convention that dictates that he should, despite the fact that society is crumbling and his voice is coloured with sadness. “Before everything, it wasn’t very good in Europe either.”

“But not like this?” John asks gently, trying not to seem insensitive.

Lafayette shrugs uncomfortably, his expression saying _this subject is closed,_ so John drops it. Predictably, it’s Alexander that begins talking again.

“What about you, kid?”

“I’m older than you.” objects John mildly. Of course, Alexander just shrugs, which he’s getting used to.

“Maybe. How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

He looks momentarily defeated before the apparently endless diatribe starts up. “Okay, you’re older than me. Big deal. How come you’re still around, and on your own?”

 _That blank look of anger in the eyes of the man at the checkpoint, the rush of panicked adrenaline, instincts he hadn’t even known he’d possessed screaming_ RUN _, the darkness of the forest rushing past him and then- the fire- the fire in the night, the heat and the glow of it on his back as he ran and then Mary’s hand slipping out of his no matter how tightly he’d grasped it-_

“Blown up.” he chokes out eventually, realising he’s been silent and staring. Lafayette and Alexander exchange a worried glance.

“ _Quoi?_ ”

“My f-family.” He coughs quietly, then quickly swipes the back of his hand over his eyes. Maybe he almost cried, whatever: they can’t really judge him. “I mean, I don’t know really – I don’t know whether alive or not, but-”

“It’s okay.” comes Lafayette’s voice, gentle and close, and when John looks up he’s surprised to find that the kid is standing right nose to nose with him with his hands over his shoulders like he _wants_ to hug John but isn’t sure whether it would make the situation better or worse. “It’s okay. My parents were gone when I was very young, but my papy, my mamie, I don’t know either.”

John melts forward a little, into the embrace, and Lafayette throws his arms around him; Alexander, still sitting at the table, is silent. Being a little shorter than him, John’s head is tipped up to just balance on Lafayette’s shoulder, and he looks at Alexander and thinks of asking _What about you? What about your family, Alex?_ , because for the first time in months he has unthreatening human contact and it is far, far too effective than the hopes and half-truths John was feeding himself to stay alive not to share.

But then he remembers the clipped tone in which Alexander had said _Before the war,_ notices the way that he’s staring at a spot of dirt on the floor rather than at the affection between the two boys in front of him, and realises that there could be no other answer to that question than _there’s nobody to miss._ The awkward way in which he hovers over Lafayette suddenly seems to make a lot more sense.

All that Alexander’s non-stop mouth allows is a few peaceful second. He’s gentle about it – but, _still_. Dude is allergic to quiet.

“Why did you hang around, though?”

And now that John thinks about it, it doesn’t really make any sense. He could have moved, _should_ have. But he just didn’t. Somehow, over the days and days and days he spent squirreled away in his room, it had never occurred to him for more than a moment to leave. _It’s not safe to go outside,_ he had told himself.

It’s not safe to stay inside either.

“I guess I was waiting.” he says to the ground, ashamed.

“Waiting for what?”

“I-” John’s beginning is strong, at least, but then he falters. “I don’t know.”

“Alex hates waiting.” Lafayette tells him cheerfully from where the kid’s wandered back to his noodles. Somehow he is relentlessly, resiliently happy: John suspects there’s something underneath the smile that nevertheless does manage to reach his eyes. A kind of coping mechanism, maybe. It’s not unlike the kind of laugh-it-off-and-carry-on attitude that he and his siblings use to adopt in the face of his father’s home-grown brand of insanity. “We’re moving south, towards Georgia. Not standing still.”

“Couldn’t stand still if I had a gun to my head.” grins Alexander, sharp and bright – then cringes a little at the turn of phrase.

John thinks about these mysterious two boys, with their varied and muddied pasts, and he thinks how ragged they are and wonders where they came from, how they got here, where they’re going to go once they reach Georgia.

And just like that he realises that none of that matters, because he’s already made up his mind on what he wants.

“Take me with you.”


	8. Angelica, Eliza, Peggy... Hercules

**Chapter 8: Angelica, Eliza, Peggy... Hercules.**

It’s a solid two days’ walk up past the old fort – the thing must date back to before the Second World War, maybe even the First – but they’re used to it by now, their boots worn in by long hours marching. After a while it just seems to bend into a silent green haze.

In this vein, Eliza manages not to notice him. If not for Angelica’s screech she might have fallen over him.

“Watch out!”

It’s like waking up suddenly, like cold water being dumped over her head and snapping her out of the daze, and she backpedals just in time, stumbling over her own feet rather than place them on top of the form in front of her – her bag tumbles out of her reach, and it’s like ice down her spine as she realises _that’s where the gun is, we have to be able to get it,_ so she throws out an arm to reach for it in a panic, hair whipping in her face, and only then does she manage to comprehend exactly what it was she was avoiding stepping on.

He’s built, whoever he is. That much is visible even under a layer of mud and a badly fitted camouflage uniform, so much so that Eliza thinks for a moment that he must just be a normal U.S. soldier, before she looks up to what of his face isn’t covered by a grey beanie and realises, no, he’s not. There’s no way he’s even eighteen yet.

Her sisters catch up to her, and numbly she feels Peggy frantically helping her up as Angelica grabs the gun and turns it on the still figure lying at their feet.

For a moment the only noise is their exhausted, terrified breathing, and then Peggy chances a shy, “Is he dead?”

Eliza looks to Angelica, if only because she has supreme authority on these kinds of things. She knows that Peggy does the same thing – but Angelica, her face visibly red even though she’s the darkest of the three of them, is still fixated on the boy on the ground. Her fingers are trembling despite the white-knuckled grip she has on the pistol.

“He’s not dead.” she breathes eventually, the heaving of her chest slowing a little. “He’s unconscious.”

“No blood.” agrees Eliza, and realises she’s shaking too.

Hesitantly, and only with encouraging glances from the pair of them and the comforting weight of Eliza’s hand still held in hers, Peggy nudges the boy’s limp form with her toe. He makes a groaning mumble, then lies still again.

“What should we do?”

Peggy doesn’t know. She doesn’t know. What can they say to her? She must just think that the boy lied about his age, or that it’s a mistake, or maybe even that he’s really an adult, although Eliza would say that her sister is more observant than that.

“We should get him to Washington.” Angelica continues as the other two stare.

“But-”

Wordlessly, Eliza pulls the gun out of her bag and checks it. They’ve – she’s – only shot it four times, but she knows what to do. It still feels like theoretical knowledge rather than practical; that doesn’t matter, though. She knows. Peggy takes a long breath, then nods.

“Washington’ll know what to do. He’ll have experience, right?”

“Sure.” Eliza nods. Her voice croaks a little, but all three of them ignore it.

Look. What kind of experience could Washington possibly have? He’ll know about prisoners of war and refugees and that, yes, but that’s not that this is. This is- Eliza doesn’t know the military term for it yet. She’s not really military in the slightest, she doesn’t know _anything_. Except what Dad had told them, of course, which was mainly _shoot straight, run fast, look after your sisters._ Not advice that can be helpful here, and what is Washington going to say if they call him, anyway? “Oh, yes, I remember when a defector from the enemy came stumbling out of the woods at my loved ones, whom I needed to protect from him, and then collapsed. Similar situation, it’s all standard procedure.” Hardly. She almost laughs at the image.

They’ll have to call him anyway, whether he’ll be helpful or not: the point is moot. The general feels a kind of a paternal responsibility for- well, _everyone_. Nobody and nothing under the age of thirty is immune to his powers of surrogate-fatherhood, and not without good reason, since he insists that everyone under his direct command calls him at least once a week so he can make sure they’re okay. _Kids scout,_ Eliza once overheard him say to someone, the usual steady rhythm of his words underpinned by a foreign element of shaky fury. _Kids scout, and only in quiet areas. Adults fight. This is the twenty-first century, soldier. Think for your conscience for a moment and then tell me you want to force teenagers to fight, because if you can you’re no better than the other sides._

Washington’s own children are far, far away from the warzone where they’re fair game for battle fodder, of course. Step-children and adoptees, as far as Eliza can tell, but she wouldn’t know it if not for someone’s gossip in the tents – he was smart, got them out to Canada with his (apparently equally mother-hennish) wife while that was still possible. She knows that that’s what he wanted to do with all the families and teenagers in his camp too, but the fighting in the north is a lot worse. It’s hard enough for him to hold on to the little bits of land they’ve captured back from the Brits and the government and the terrorists on the frontier here ( _the Midwest is secure_ , she tells herself, and ignores every scrap of news that so much as suggests otherwise, because she _has_ to believe it), and Washington isn’t prepared to try and break through the line of fire that used to be New York right now. It’d put the child volunteers and refugees in his ragtag camp far too much at risk.

He explained all that to them shortly after another pair of scouts picked them up just north of the Virginia farmland his rebels had been camped on at that time; Angelica had stayed on her feet with one eye on the exits and one hand on their gun the whole time, jumpy, but Eliza had known (or at least, _hoped_ ) that he wasn’t lying, and Peggy had been too exhausted from the days of running without water to do anything other than collapsed onto the folding chair he offered. It’s not like she doesn’t understand where Angelica’s mistrust was coming from – the two scouts, another pair of teenage boys though they may have been, were sort of horrible. One of them had had this machete that he’d threatened them with, a slimy grin twisting up his face, and a head made up of seventy percent hair and twenty five percent barely-disguised malice. The other one wasn’t so much of a terrible human being, just clearly a twat. He, James, had taken their things off them but then told Thomas – the first one – to apologise, to put the knife down.

But the point still stood that, even if Washington and his rebel army couldn’t offer them an escape, he could give them something safe to do, and with the promise of clean water and hope for the future. Food was a problem, still is, but the whole nation’s running out and no one can do anything. Water was a far more pressing issue for the three of them at the time, the militia had the tablets that made it safe, and it was in this in mind that Angelica had eventually caved and said, _yes, fine. Yes, we’ll stay here. And we’ll help too._

It was Eliza that thanked him, but that’s beside the point. He might have split from the official army, but there’s still a kind of stiffness of his shoulders and something in the way that he observes others that gives the impression of an understanding and precognition of human nature far beyond that of mere mortals. She’s sure that he understood that they were grateful without the real need for words.

While she’s thinking over all of that, Angelica hands Eliza the gun and she and Peggy roll the boy over – without waking him, thank heavens – and zip-tie his wrists, periodically glancing back at their sister and her serenely calm expression, all her anxiety kept inside.

“No identification.” Angelica notes grimly.

“Wouldn’t soldiers usually have-”

“Not this kind.”

Peggy voice is confused, the look on her face hurt by another of Angelica’s quick dismissals, and not for the first time Eliza kind of wants to grab Angie and shake her. _Just because_ we _have a contingency plan for hell or high water,_ she wants to yell, _doesn’t mean that Peggy knows exactly what to do all the time automatically. It’s not enough to look after her. You have to be kind to her too._

But she won’t do that. Angelica _does_ look after them, and it’s lucky that she does.

Eliza’s lost in her thoughts, Angelica is rifling through the pockets of their captive, Peggy is ‘helping’, and it’s probably a conglomerate of these three factors that mean that no one notices the silent observation of the tall, dark figure concealed just between the nearest clump of trees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And after this ternary format takes a brief vacation, for which I apologise in advance.


	9. Aaron

_“Come on,” Theodosia laughs, and it’s like music, like heaven. Heaven in C Major. “Aaron, put the books down. It’s our last chance to have fun before the fascist regime!_

_“It’s not going to be a-” he sighs, smiling despite himself, and pushes his textbook away to reach for her hand where they’re both lying on his bed._

_But her skin is cold and smooth as gunmetal, and when he looks down Theodosia is not there at all. In his hand is a rifle, around him is not the quiet of his family home but the mud and chaos of a battlefield, and a few feet ahead of him is the prone body of a teenager dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing when they first met, a blue hoodie and handmade jeans and brand sneakers he’d been so proud of, and Aaron’s running towards him and yelling, screaming-_

He cries out weakly, coming to consciousness as a drowning man comes to air – desperately, but without strength. All he can be thankful for is that he didn’t actually scream for Hercules. Just kind of choked.

Above him is a damp green sky of leaves and branches, below him is the uneven and uncomfortable ground; Aaron’s ears are ringing painfully, and if not for that and a hum of warning deep in his stomach, he probably would have been content to stay here despite the discomfort.

As it is, he drags himself up onto his knees and looks around, his eyes catching on a heap of bulky limbs and bruises next to him where Hercules was thrown by the force of the explosion. Whatever was bombing the base must have seen their movement through the forest and targeted it – maybe infrared cameras, Aaron thinks to himself – but probably won’t be coming after them. No one from the army’ll care, that’s for sure. They’ll have gone underground, like a turtle retreating into its shell, and it’s fifty/fifty whether they’ll mark their only two surviving child soldiers down as Missing In Action or just plain Deceased.

Two clumsy fingers laid gently on his friend’s neck confirm that Hercules’s heart is still beating, at least. Relieved, exhausted, he drops his chin to rest on his chest and wonders where they’re going to from here. Not back: that’s for sure.

Aaron shakes his head while thinks, trying to clear the tinnitus from his ears. According to the maps he’s pored over when Montgomery was distracted, the scant spare seconds spent trying desperately to think past the fog of panic, the conflicts in the north between the military and the Brits are without mercy. So they can’t go that way. Mexico has officially closed its borders to refugees, and the loony extremists seem to finding their way up to the southern states through Latin America. So they can’t go that way. Hercules’s own personal favourite, the rebel militias, have a solidly secured block all across the Midwest – but Aaron really, really doesn’t know what he thinks of them. An all-American revolution isn’t exactly his style.

His hearing returns with a painful pop and he hisses, rubbing the side of his head – then freezes as the now audible sound of approaching feet reaches him. There’s a girl walking towards them, dark hair plaited over her shoulder and a long blue coat just brushing the hems of her wellies. Just behind her are two indistinct others, furthermore.

Bolt or hide. He has two options here, he realises, still kneeling on the dirty ground. Bolt or hide. Fight or flight doesn’t come into it: confrontation’s not an option that Aaron likes to consider. Especially when he’s outnumbered, and with no weapons. He bets these kids have weapons.

But he shouldn’t- he _can’t_ just leave Hercules there, though. No way.

So he stumbles to his feet and slips into the darkness between the trees, stays perfectly still as the apparently absentminded girl wanders closer and closer.

*

There’s no independent malice in the three of them, Aaron can at least cling to that. They’re freaked out, and they cuff Herc despite the fact that he’s _unconscious_ , but they’re not trying to hurt him.

Then again, the feral kitten that almost mauled his eye out when he was seven wasn’t trying to hurt him either. It was just as scared as they are. And they’re armed with far more dangerous weaponry than little claws.

The eldest of them, he can tell straight away, is a force to be reckoned with. Dangerous as hell, definitely, but so clearly intelligent that he wishes for a second that they were in a world where crazy King George hadn’t decided to wage war on literally everything, where Middle Eastern extremists had never mobilised, where the American government had never committed the atrocities that stirred its people to revolution, where she and him could sit down and discuss politics and relativity. Perhaps it’s just the aftermath of the dream, but for the first time in a long while he wishes his Theo was there too. She’d know what to do.

There must be hidden strength under each of their pastel cardigans and raincoats, only hinted at by the sturdy overalls all three appear to be wearing, because the little one and the eldest manage to lift Hercules’s sculpted form with an over each other their respective shoulder and pull him in the same direction they were heading, with considerable urgency. The pale girl with the gun watches warily. And Aaron, like a shadow, slinks behind.


	10. Lafayette, Alexander, John

Sneaking out under cover of darkness and all that jazz reminds Lafayette almost painfully of his parents’ city house back in France. He had been young to try any of that before they died, but something in the emptiness of the night is stirring old memories of hurrying along with his father, hand in hand, of the slight thrill of being up too late on some overly political dinner or opera, of bending the rules as they slipped away under the streetlamps, pushing to see how far they could stretch before it was just blatantly _breaking_ the rules. He hadn’t understood it at the time, but he knows now. There is something irresistible about rebellion.

After that, though, they were gone, and his family’s big country estate had nowhere to sneak out to. Out of the house? Yes. Off his land? Nope.

It wasn’t that his grandparents gave him any particular reasons to run away, of course. He worries about them very much, and his school friends, and everyone- it’s just, they were never very close, and sometimes when he disappeared off for days at a time they wouldn’t even seem to-

It’s easy to forget all of that with Alexander. Before they met, Lafayette was living in an expensive hotel paid for by his mother’s jewellery, very probably. He had said he would be happy to be moved to somewhere more ‘ _économique’_ – _Grand-_ _père_ was the kind of guy so concerned with staring down his nose at the world that he could barely see straight, and the word ‘cheaper’ would have put him right off – but his grandfather wouldn’t hear of it, snapping _certainement_ _pas!_ down the phone. And after that the war got worse in Europe, and there were no more phone calls, and there was no more money.

In the end, Lafayette wandered off from the hotel in the middle of the day and just didn’t come back, because he couldn’t pay and this country was too busy panicking to take care of him.

Cleaning the dishes in the diner he washed up in two days later, penniless, was Alexander.

Alex was lying about his age, his living situation (or lack thereof), and his family. Lafayette was completely lost. So, somehow, it seemed logical for them to stick together – a good thing that they did, too, because less than a week after they first threw a stolen blanket over themselves and huddled into a doorway together, the bomb went off. He thinks that despite everything that had gone before, that moment was the defining point of Before and After: they knew each other briefly Before, but After is... different. They rely on each other and nothing else.

Lafayette does like John, though. He’s sweet and kind and just a little bit messed, and even borderline-paranoid cautious Alex seems to have accepted that the kid has no ulterior motive. Probably. It’s not like Laf’s an expert, is it? Even if Alex sometimes acts worryingly as though he is.

Anyway. Lafayette is walking ahead of the pair of them, the little cut on his forehead that John had cleaned up for him at the house stinging gently and distracting him. He must have looked a sight, the clothes he’d run away in filthy by now, his hair matted in its tired ponytail, his face bloodied; John is still relatively neat, considering, but he hadn’t seem to mind what they looked like.

He doesn’t seem to mind the way that Alexander’s grimy hand brushes familiarly against him either, but that’s their own private business and Lafayette is staying out of it. _Way_ out of it.

“I brought some maps with me from St. Croix,” Alex is explaining, his voice bright in that way it only is when he goes off on a rant. “They’re all kind of old, and I got some of them from the library- don’t look at me like that, I was going to put them back-”

“Uh huh.”

“Shut up. Look, I got these street maps and everything. I was going to go to New York – I never got there, of course, but me and Lafayette know where we’re going at least. These Southern state ones turned out more useful that I’d thought.”

“ _Amis,_ ” calls the youngest boy, suddenly curious. “I’ve ‘ad a thought.”

“ _Que_ _Dieu_ _nous aide.”_

“ _Ferme ta gueule_ _, Alexandre._ John, you won’t be knowing too much about the state of current affairs, right?”

There – an unpleasant little crease appears between John’s eyebrows, so far a sure sign of deep unhappiness. He’s gentle and welcoming, too much so that he won’t admit that they’re making him uncomfortable. Case in point, when he notices Laf’ looking at him, the corner f his mouth twitches up on automatic and he runs a hand habitually through his hair.

“Well,” he admits, suddenly fixated on the placement of his feet against the road they’re following. “No. I had a radio, but-”

“But the bunker they were transmitting that stuff from got blown up and now it’s just a satellite repeating the same signals and driving you insane?”

John swallows dryly and nods at Alexander’s blunt words.

“Lucky you weren’t alone too long. Some of them _actually_ lose it, the real Bible Belt kids, usually. They end up thinking it’s a punishment from God. Except the terrorists, obviously.”

“I-”

“My point _was_ ,” Lafayette cuts in, unwilling to let Alex accidentally drive some poor kid to a panic attack this early on in their acquaintance. “That John is going to want to now why we’re going where we’re going. _Oui?_ ”

“Ah. _Mais oui._ ”

The sarcastic eye-roll Lafayette directs at the sky is nothing more than instinctually French, aimed at neither of them so much as at their combined stupidity, and luckily they both seem to pick up on that.

“Georgia is rebel territory.”

John stops. Just... stops. Right in the middle of the road, which doesn’t really make a difference when you consider that there are barely any cars around anymore, but definitely makes his behaviour seem even more inapposite.

“Rebels?!”

 _Uh oh,_ thinks something inside Lafayette, a very new something born of war and fear that radiates instinctual distrust at everything new and unfamiliar. _He’s going to leave us. He’s going to tell where we are. The men from the army are going to come after us and hurt us and the Brits are gong to scorch the army clean off the face of the earth and then they and the rebels and the loony extremists’ll hurl bombs at each other until the end of time and France will fade further and further away from me, right off the horizon..._

“You- you said that you weren’t with anybody, that you were alone,” stammers John.

“We are,” Alexander cuts in quickly, because the boy has no idea what damage control is. “But we’re going towards the rebels. You don’t have to come with us, it just-”

“They just seem a million times safer than anyone else.” nods Lafayette desperately. They’re both staring at John with wide eyes and fingers itching for anything to defnd themselves with, on high alert.

“What’s wrong with the military?”

John’s voice is very thin, and Laf’s pretty sure that he can hear the same sinking feeling of disappointment in his voice that Alexander and he are experiencing. Here was this guy, this friend-ally-something-more, who they thought would be on their side. Who doesn’t meet a new person and start helplessly imagining your life with them in it, after all? But he’s a loyalist, or whatever the goddamn term is now.

The problem is, though, that Alex had already bypassed ‘disappointment’ and fallen straight into the more volatile territory of ‘fury’. It’s not truly anger behind his friend’s eyes, more a combination of frustration and passion and defensiveness, but to an almost-stranger such as John the two things must be practically indistinguishable.

“What’s wrong with them? What’s _right_ with them?!”

“Al-”

“Shut up, Laf’!”

His words sting, but he doesn’t mean them. Not really. Lafayette knows that, and yet he can’t help somehow feeling very young and very unstable and very alone again.

“You saw the wound on his head, right?” Alex is shouting. It makes the other two boys twitch slightly – they weren’t being exactly subtle before this, but, still. This feels like deliberately _asking_ someone to notice them. “Guess who gave him that. Not the most scary guy, is he? No? Didn’t seem to matter to them, because he still got shoved around and hit and threatened like he was an adult. They still said they’d kill him! And when they finally, finally believed that we weren’t spies, when they finally got their _loaded, deadly_ weapons out of our faces, they decided we were fit to serve.”

John’s expression is full of horror; Alex is nearly hysterical. There are more gentle ways to break such things to people, to tell them that the authority you’ve relied on and trusted your whole life has a grotesque second face, but there’s no time for any of that. Lafayette knows the feeling. To him, America had seemed like new hope – he had known, of course, that not all could be as perfect as it seemed: he couldn’t helped but wish that it was, though – and even if the rumours of England under George III had seemed nightmarish, implausible (until those leaked photographs, and they- ugh), to think that _America_ was capable of any of that?

“In the time that you’ve been listening to their fucking lies on loop, you never heard that. Did you? Every man and woman in their teens or above is officially drafted, U.S. citizen or not.” There’s tears in his eyes as he affects a mocking, bitter tone for a moment. “Human rights? What’s that? Nuh uh. Grab a gun, kiddo. You fight for us or we’ll blow your brains out.”

He turns away, and Lafayette has to step between them as John makes as though to move after him, not knowing that Alexander’s first instinct at this point is going to be to punch whoever touches him. A shake of his head may not convey that exact sentiment to John, but it’s enough to stop him.

“They zip-tied us to stop us running,” he says softly. John doesn’t seem to object to a comforting hand on his shoulder. “But Alex bit through mine in the night. He’s an idiot, he nearly broke a tooth.”

“Did not.” half-laughs Alexander, sniffing up the remains of his wild emotional outburst.

“Yes you did! And then we ran away from them, through the city. You see, it was not all bad, because also we managed to grab some of the tablets to make clean water on the way out. Plus, while we were there I heard them saying that they’re going to win because the rebels don’t use those kind of dirty tactics, so...” He shrugs. “So we’re going to the rebels.”

“I’m sorry.” John whispers to Alex. Lafayette can’t help but wince guiltily, because he sounds it, but Alex is already ahead of him.

“It’s not your fault. God, sorry- it’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t know-”

“We know.”

“No.” John’s voice is as determined as it is earnest, and that goddamn crease between his brows is back. “No, I really don’t know anything. At all. You guys have to tell me these kinds of things; just don’t, like, kill me. Okay?”

If not for the very real worry in his eyes, Lafayette would laugh.

“Because I want to trust you. But that means putting my life in your hands, in a super literal sense.”

“We won’t let you down.” Laf’ smiles.

It probably doesn’t help half as much as the way that Alexander takes John’s hand does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little longer than most chapters, but the last one was a little shorter. As you may be able to tell, if these three move too fast my timeline gets fucked up. So, much dialogue, little movement.
> 
> Que Dieu nous aide. - God help us
> 
> Ferme ta gueule, Alexandre. - Shut up, Alexander.


	11. Angelica, Eliza, Peggy, Hercules

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Underestimate any of the Schuyler sisters at your own peril, okay?

“Liz, shh. Angie! I think he’s waking up.”

“Oh crap! Have-”

“ _Language_.”

“Have you got-”

“Yes, but grab your things. We might still have to...”

The talking trails off as Hercules fully regains consciousness, realising he’s laying on his face on a blanket somewhere.

How the fuck did he get here?!

Everything’s kind of burry, the fact that the only thing in his immediate field of vision is a stray blade of grass not even considered. He remembers being unable to sleep last night, unwilling at the same time to admit that he was feeling scared, knowing that somehow, miraculously, Aaron was snoring in relative peace on his own cot. Then what? Then- Well, he’s pretty sure it was morning after that. They were ushered outside, ducked under the mess hall to keep out of the gentle morning rain, and _holy fuck._ One last chance to escape and they actually took it. Wow.

That doesn’t really explain why he’s lying on the ground, but it gives a little context, at least.

When he rolls over, he is faced with a contradiction in bright salmon pink. Something in a mind that knows everything there is to know about colours schemes tells him to utterly disregard the slightly limp raincoat, to look up to the grim set of her lips where she’s standing over him and think _they know they should be cherry red, should be delivering a scathing takedown to some overconfident freshman somewhere._ Hercules’s mind envisions a crimson dress, those slightly overgrown curls just brushing her shoulders, rubies in her ears. The two girls on either side of her have planted themselves sturdily, like lieutenants – but he’d have to be an idiot not to realise that they’re both equally as elegant: dark blue and silk, maybe, for the paler one in the eggshell coat; and, God, that yellow cardigan on the little one is ugly, but maybe a fun kind of ugly, he could work with that, bold, bright blocks of colours, stripes...

It takes him a moment to work out that he’s still lying like a stranded whale in handcuffs and that staring blankly up at three very jumpy faces isn’t going to do him any favours. They’re younger than he is. The youngest has got to be- what, twelve? Just about hitting her teens? Doesn’t really matter because, even if the fierce one tries to hide it, they are without exception _freaked._

Slightly frustratingly, he wonders where Aaron is. Words are far more his thing than Hercules, and he’s got to think of something eloquent, something that’ll tell them he’s to a threat, something that’ll reassure them enough that they won’t snap and kill him. Something smart.

Blaming it on his head injury doesn’t undo the fact that what comes out of his mouth is,

“...Yo.”

The little one half-sighs, half-giggles in relief and relaxes slightly, taking a little step away from him. He’s not surprised when the other two and their grim determination stay totally fixed on him. Well, good. He knows that look, and that look means _we take care of our own, we don’t leave anyone behind, and if you hurt our smallest and gentlest you’re going to suffer._ It’s familiar because he’s worn it, once or twice. What can he say? It’s not a crime to want to take care of people.

(The thought of Hugh, his baby brother, rises briefly, but he quashes it. No spare time for that kind of uncertain pain right now.)

“Who are you?” demands the eldest one, her voice frosty and clipped. “How did you get here?”

“M’name’s Hercules Mulligan. Herc for short.”

If not for the whole ‘living in a warzone’ thing, Hercules has a feeling that the face that the pale girl is sending his way would translate to _I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed that you would try to lie to me._

“No, really.” he sighs. “My folks liked the classics.”

“And how-”

“How’d I get here? You chicks dragged me here, right? Because this wasn’t where I was when I blacked out.”

“Listen,” snarls the eldest. He is suddenly and irrevocably reminded of the dorky documentaries that Hugh used to love, of some sleepy old dude’s voice vicariously invigorated for a moment as he would say something like _lionesses, unlike male lions, fight to the death. Here, we see one moving in for the kill to protect her pride._

“Angelica.” chides the pale one softly. Almost instantly, she backs down – doesn’t move at all, of course, but stops in her tracks and seems content to observe as her sister crouches carefully to his level.

“We just want to know we’re safe. We’re not trying to hurt you.” she explains and gently tucks a stray strand of dark hair behind her ear. _Speak for yourself,_ he thinks, still looking at Angelica. “And that means knowing that you’re not our enemy.”

“I defected.” he blurts out. And then immediately realises how dumb that sounds. “Aw, shit. It sounds kind of professional when you say it like that, right? I mean that I- don’t know, deserted? Me and my buddy, we got the hell out of that shit-show. Well, he’s not exactly my buddy- whatever. There was a raid and we used the excuse to run.”

“Where is he now? Your friend?”

Hercules swallows over a sudden lump of worry in his throat. “I don’t know.”

There’s a small _crack_ behind them, probably just some lucky little animal oblivious to the war raging around it that seems to have stepped on a twig. Whatever it is, it’s enough to send two of the girls whirling around to scan the horizon anxiously, but the closest to him stays perfectly still. Not once does her gaze falter.

“I believe you.” she tells him, quiet and sincere. “But it’s going to take a lot more than that to convince Angelica – and we haven’t told Peggy what probably happened to all her school friends.”

A wave of relief washes over him as he nods. _She knows, she isn’t on their side, she’ll defend me to her crazy-ass sister. Or at least try to._

“My name’s Eliza,” she adds, like an afterthought, but he’s already talking.

“Dude, I have _lost feeling_ in my hands.”

Angelica glances back over to him dispassionately and snorts.

“Yeah, I know y’all don’t trust me and shit, and that’s fair enough, but I just want you to know I’m going to complain about it when I develop neuropathy, or whatever.”

“Don’t be a baby.” she snaps. There’s a little less venom in her voice than before, but Hercules is still kind of terrified to think about her as, like, y’know. Sexy and all. Which is freaking _awesome_. “The scouts that picked us up were a hundred times worse than we are.”

“Oh yeah?” There’s a challenge in her tone, and he can’t help responding to it. “The army guys threw-”

Eliza blinks once, perfectly innocent and just on the dangerous side of warning. And because he’s a wuss, he changes the subject.

“Scouts for who?”

“Whom.” corrects Angelica. Apparently purely out of pettiness.

“Okay, so now I know you’re a huge nerd – but I still don’t know where your allegiance is.”

Hercules has been steadily returning the glare that Angelica is sending his way, but he drops it when Peggy’s petite form nudges her way awkwardly forward. She’s silhouetted for a moment against the glare of the sun, then moves so that he can see that truly hideous yellow sweater, those big brown eyes, that innocently simplistic. It’s clear enough that, from a tactical standpoint, he’d have to be suicical to mess with her. Eliza and Angelica would rip him to shreds. Of course (as he reminds himself when she hesitates and bites the inside of her cheek uncertainly) he wouldn’t dream of trying to harm her even if it her sisters weren’t around. Ever.

“We work for General Washington.” she says carefully, every word meaningful. Kinda reminds Hercules of a less sleazy Aaron, that slow way with words, like Aaron might’ve been when he was a kid used to being ignored and talked down to.

No joke: Herc’s brain maybe shorts out just a little bit with delight.

“The _General?!_ ” he yells, and would totally swear on his life that it didn’t come out as a squeak.

Somehow, Eliza’s gun ends up in Angelica’s hands, and he reckons he either calms down or he faces the consequences of making that woman twitchy.

“Hey, sorry, sorry. But, man! The General!”

“Good thing/bad thing?” Peggy tries, smiling slightly, and she seems so cautiously friendly that Hercules chances a huge grin back.

“Helluva good thing! Oh, shit, when I woke up I thought the military had me again or something, but this is great. I’ve wanted to join the rebels ever since they split.”

At his honest enthusiasm, the exterior of the eldest of them seems to crack a little bit – which is a good thing, too, because her lowering the gun allows Eliza to snatch it back to safety.

“Prove that you aren’t going to hurt my sisters and maybe we’ll get along, Mr. Mulligan.” says Angelica, her expression solemn but her voice coloured with amusement.

“Untie me before my hands fall off and I might just agree.” he shoots back.

All in all, this could be a lot worse; the girls are on the side he wants to join, they’re guarded enough not to fall into any traps, and he doesn’t have much information but he has enough to sell to Washington in exchange for his life, if he has to. He probably won’t, not considering how desperate they must be for troops. Aaron, the human encyclopaedia that he is, probably knows enough to bring down the whole wretched system...

_Jesus fucking Christ. Where’s Aaron?!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updating every three days is no longer sustainable, as I am in the middle of my second round of mock exams and there's a change real exams might roll around before I'm done with this. As of now, I'm updating every four days, and that might slow down even further - thanks for your patience!


	12. John, Alexander, Lafayette, Aaron (part one)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so every four days was an underestimate. But I do believe that I am capable of sticking to this deadline, especially that I'm off school for a week now - delay in this chapter's posting is most likely due to the fact that my exams fried my brain.  
> For AJ_Skye and her lovely bookmark!!

John would really like to say that the sight of the forest at the edge of town doesn’t send a shiver down his spine, he really would.

But that would be lying.

“You okay?” asks Alexander, at what seems to be his usual loud and half-feverish pitch. He’s standing right next to John, a few feet away from where the road disappears into the woods, but his voice seems to come from far away.

“Huh?” John forces himself to blink and swallow over a suddenly dry throat. “Yeah. I mean- yeah.”

“What’s up?”

No point in lying, really. If he’s going to freak out he’s going to freak out, and the least he can do is have the decency to explain why to his friends; unfortunately, the only way that he can think to do it right now is to point numbly at the darkness. Last time he was here the way was lit with yellow lamplight, and besides, it had all seemed a lot less sinister from the inside of his father’s car. Ominous, sure, but not haunted by his brother and sister and maybe even his dad, lost somewhere between the trees.

“There used to be a tollbooth down there,” he says carefully. Lafayette has drawn up to them from where he had stopped a moment to tie his shoe, and he’s doing that thing where he stays unobtrusive and quiet but watches and listens and stores away little bits of information, and John feels a stab of guilt at making the kid worried for him. Laf’s going to be a goddamn menace when he’s older: right now, though, Alex and John are some kind of twisted loco parentis situation with him. They’ve got to act like it. “Me and my family tried to get out pretty early on, but the extremists had already got it.”

Alex nods slowly, remembering the broken conversation they had yesterday evening. “And they were...”

_Blown up. And you don’t know whether any of them survived. And you keep having nightmares about that place._

“...Yeah.”

“Is there any particular reason we have to stick to the roads, then?” calls Lafayette. His accent is still stark and prominent, and John almost smiles.

“The only map I’ve got is a roadmap.” gripes Alex.

“ _Oui_ , but-”

“But we could still totally go around the edges of the roads and dodge the whole checkpoint issue, right?”

“Uh huh. _Le garçon_ _est un génie_ _!_ ”

“You joke, but it doesn’t make it untrue.”

Something in the two boys’ easy back and forth seems to calm John’s nerves a bit, as does the suggestion of doing literally anything other than heading into the forest. Relaxing a little stiffly, he reaches up to rub the back of his neck under his ponytail.

“So, um, you guys want to go through the trees?”

Before John can see it coming or actually, you know, give any impression that he’s onboard with the whole physically clinging to people that Alex has been doing over the last twenty four hours, there’s an arm thrown over his shoulder that makes him jump. Weirdly, the first thing to go through his head is _he’s tiny, how the hell is he reaching up here? Is he standing on his tip-toes?_ , followed shortly by _CUTE BOY CUDDLING ALERT ALERT._

“Sounds good.” nods Alexander, with a grin that could cut marble. Lafayette makes a faintly disgusted groan, mumbling what could be _Jésus,_ _l'affection,_ but could also just as easily be _Jésus, land tension_. John flushes bright red, caught off-guard.

“Keep it in your pants, Alexandre!”

If Alex’s smiles cut, his glares burn, but Lafayette just laughs it (and the middle finger he receives) off. And John, still with the younger boy’s arm around him, does his best to appreciate the warmth of it and not think about the million possible outcomes of it and the fact that Alex’s hair looks silky soft and his eyes are really unfairly huge and smouldering. The air is colder – it’ll be getting dark soon.

*

Of course Hercules would’ve managed to find the only three people in the whole mad world that _don’t_ want to kill him. Of course. Because he never ever listened when Aaron counselled caution, and the _one time_ that it could possibly have worked out – it did.

Why the hell is it that people get their dumbass, reckless ideas vindicated like this?!

Not to frame the entire afternoon’s events in a wholly negative light, of course: Aaron’s almost breathless with relief that Herc isn’t going to get his skull bashed in or anything to that effect, it’s just that he’s holding in so much frustration and angst that when the pale girl (‘Eliza’, is it?) carefully brushes natural debris out of her path to kneel down close to Herc and confirm that they’re really, really not about to kill him, he leans forwards to see more clearly, puts his weight considerably more on his right leg than it had been, and-

_CRACK._

-shit.

Eliza, at least, stays on a level with Hercules; Aaron’s pissed all the same that he’s managed to startle the dangerous elder enough to make her whirl around with her claws out, that he’s scared the little one enough that she looks ready to bolt on a word from her sisters. The only thing that he can think of to do is freeze up and try not to move so much as his eyes as they both scan the darkness for the source of the broken twig.

The moment they turn away, he begins to rack his brain for a solution. He’s a human being, not a shadow, he can’t trail them forever. Especially considering that he has no food supply and the things that the dangerous one (‘Angelica’, did he hear them say?) is likely to try and do to anyone lurking around her family.

Think. Think. _Think_.

They’ve dumped half the stuff out of their bags onto the grass – along with Hercules, of course – and Eliza has brushed her hair out of its plaits. Peggy had even taken her boots off before Angelica warned her to put them back on... so they don’t appear to be planning on going anywhere anytime soon. Hercules isn’t going to be able to walk if he stays in that position any longer, anyway.

Theoretically, Aaron could leave them and come back. But the risk is-

Fuck the risk. Ignoring it seems to work for Herc, and the girls, and the rebels. What were the odds against the Moon Landing ever even getting off the ground? Conspiracy theories aside, they still got there and not one person died. He thinks of his mother, thinks of what she’d do, and then of Theo and the girl whose hand is edging closer and closer to her sister’s gun and their similarities.

So he turns away, careful now of where he puts his feet and not wanting to spook the girls any further, and begins towards what must be the other end of the woods.

It’ll be getting dark soon again anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (...sorry)
> 
> Jésus, l'affection - Jesus, affection  
> Le garçon est un genie! - The boy is a genius!


	13. James and Thomas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This clusterfuck of a story has gotten so mixed up that ternary format seems to gone spiralling into the void - but I hope you enjoy it anyway!

Sometimes, James thinks his life would be a lot easier if he had any spare time to just kind of... scream. Just lie down on his face and scream into the ground until everyone gives him a wide berth again and he has enough space to breathe.

Yeah, that’d be nice. Cathartic.

But, unfortunately, spare time is a thing of the past. If he didn’t spend every waking moment running around camp looking for somebody or something or moving thing A to place B, he’d sit down with a calculator and work out exactly how the seconds of his days are divided, sleeping, eating, and working – very few of them are sleeping, he knows that, which emeans he can’t afford to give any of them up to do dumb stuff like mess around with math.

Probably the one redeeming aspect as volunteering as a scout, other than Washington’s melted-frost half-smile and warm _We’re grateful, son_ , was that it had been relatively uneventful. Even if he and Thomas still spent a solid ninety percent of it walking, they could chat if they felt like it, they could pause for a moment to drink or tie their shoes, or just because they wanted to. Only _relatively_ uneventful, though. Only uneventful when you look at it logically, and not through the scope of James’s memory: the memory that can’t help replaying the hiding from British forces with Thomas’s hand pressed over his mouth because when Thomas freaks out he doesn’t remember that people can’t help doing things like breathing, and that James’s breathing really isn’t as loud as it had seemed right in that moment; that won’t forget how he didn’t realise they only had half the water tablets they needed miles and miles away from rebel territory, how terrified he was that they’d get sick; that keeps reminding him in crystal-clear definition how he and Thomas had come up against the Schuyler sisters and Thomas had got this sick smile on his face like, like...

(Like he’d enjoyed how scared the girls were.)

It hurts to remember, sometimes, that Thomas has another side. James might not see it very often, but that’s no excuse – he should remind himself, but he’s lonely and he’s tired and Thomas is very tall and sort of bouncy, and charismatic in a way that makes James forget.

“Maddy!”

Nuh uh. Only one person calls him that, one particular asshole with the gravitational pull of a planet, whom James is just stuck in the orbit of, who-

Thomas catches up to him as easily as though both of them haven’t been run off their feet since they woke up, jostling his shoulder with a grin so optimistic it could end the war. James almost drops the memos he’s holding, stumbles slightly in the much-trodden muck between the tents, but manages to keep soldiering on at his previous speed. It doesn’t make much of a difference to Thomas anyway, who only needs to take one step to every three that James does. Maybe it’d be easier not to think about him if he wasn’t so goddamn _tall_ -

“What’s up?” he asks, his curiosity just a little too intense to be from casual boredom. But James isn’t going to think about that. (Not now). “You’ve got more creases than the General’s uniform.”

“Oh, super funny.” James shoots back. His voice is thinner than Thomas’s, maybe a little deeper in potentia, but unbroken as of yet – he’s fifteen, when the hell is puberty going to get a move on? – and just generally quieter, without that those ridiculous abs to reverberate around.

“No, no, I’m serious – can I just...”

He’s tired. Maybe that’s the reason that he actually lets Thomas pause him and bend down a little and use his thumb to smooth out the stress wrinkles that are compressing his forehead, still smiling.

“There. Much prettier.”

James exhales slowly, and just for a moment feels peaceful. It’s as though he’s just forgotten what Thomas is like, the world around them, what he has to do, all the chaos. The need to scream disappears.

And then returns again as Thomas continues speaking.

“Like me, see? No wrinkles, ‘cause I’m not an old man.”

“You’re a narcissist.” he sighs, ducking out of his friend’s hands to resume his hurrying along, and all the worrying that goes with it.

“Well, yeah.” laughs Thomas, drawing it out, and keeps pace. “But what _are_ you doing?”

It had been around midday when they’d received the transmission, apparently, but in a veritable data storm of their own signals, other people’s signals, abandoned signals churning out white noise, and the fact that practically everything is coded, it hadn’t been listened to until now.

“We got a call from Eliza Schuyler. She and the others say they’ve found a U.S. army recruit passed out, and that it looks like he got caught in an explosion. It’s under control.” Or, it was, as of six hours ago. He’s pretty sure that the tech people’s basic plan is to get James to tell Washington there’s minors in a position of all-too-possible danger, which will result in Washington actually standing up from behind the plastic picnic table he’s commandeered as a desk (at first, people don’t think it’s nearly as intimidating as some huge chunk of wood; then they remember who’s sitting behind it, and start quaking in their boots as is proper), striding over to the communications tent, and calling the Schuyler sisters repeatedly until they pick up and confirm that they’re safe.

This thought process does not occur to Thomas, unsurprisingly. Thomas heard the first sentence and from that point on had his mind on other things, just waiting for James to stop talking, and with that realisation James feels suddenly even smaller than he really is. Which is pretty small.

“Eliza? She’s cute, but in a kinda evangelical way. I can see her giving up her spare time to help to orphaned blind bunnies, you know what I mean?”

When James sends a reproachful glance his way, he throws his hands up and backtracks a little.

“I’m not saying that’s a bad thing!”

“ _Tom_ -”

“Chill, Maddy. All I was trying to explain was that Angie gives off ‘I’d kill you all in your sleep if you gave me a reason’ vibes, and I wanna explore that up close. Get me?”

They’re outside Washington’s tent by now, and James is cursing both everyone’s reluctance to let Thomas do anything of importance (and therefore letting him just wander around), and his own short-sightedness in forgetting why it’s pointless to rush around camp in times like this. Everyone always wants the General’s attention – from the little kids they’ve pulled out of hostage situations and besieged towns to his actual military strategists and advisors, and not always for entirely different reasons – and there’s usually a queue. It’s like running to a bus stop even though the bus is rarely on time: you’ve just got to turn up and hope you’re lucky.

Today, though, it seems that they are lucky. The equally tired-looking girl at the entrance – Dolley, he thinks, but who knows really, all James has the energy to recall is that she is destined for a prolific future in PR Management if she survives the war – offers the pair of them a weak smile and a whispered, “He and Steuben should be done soon.” and James suddenly has a stroke of genius. Not an actual stroke. God forbid.

“Didn’t you get a headache for like two days last time you tried to speak to Angelica?”

 _Victory._ For once, Thomas is left speechless as von Steuben edges his way out of the tent and James darts inside. It doesn’t last – it never does – but he’s quick enough that Washington doesn’t seem to identify that the shout of “ _Dolley has a crush on you!”_ and the resulting squawk as she kicks him is aimed at James.

The General doesn’t need to speak out loud to get his point across. It’s not a skill that James has ever mastered, and doubts he ever will, but he really wishes he could: the way that Washington half-arches one eyebrow means _what now?_ more expressively than several paragraphs from James ever could.

“Information from the Schuylers, sir.”

He sits up a little straighter, and James thinks, yeah, this is a nightmare, but at least Washington looks out for them. He’ll probably have forces out looking for the girls by tomorrow if anything seems wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I. Hate. TJeffs. For the sake of me not killing his character off, /when/ Sally Hemings appears in this fic, he will NOT be interacting with her.  
> On that note, though, there totally needs to be a very thorough, serious conversation about the erasure of characters like her in fandom and even real life history to make people like Jefferswag seem less problematic. When it happens I am going to listen very carefully and act according to what I learn, but as a person who is, a), white, and therefore not someone with experience of institutionalised racism; and, b), British, so not overly familiar with American history, I am not the person to start it.  
> While the Macaroni Fucker as portrayed by Daveed Diggs does have some redeeming features (or is a fun kind of asshole, at the very least) historically, Corridor Bed was a twat. And I will be writing him as one. So, no chapters from his perspective. Ever.


	14. John, Alexander, Lafayette, Aaron (part two)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so, so, so sorry for the delay. I have taken the time to plan the next five chapters and write a bit of the ending though, so I can promise you all that this work is not going to be abandoned before it is finished!

Aaron reckons he’s been walking for around two hours when he hears it. Of course, he also knows that the human brain is very, very bad at approximating time beyond an hour or so, and that he’s tired, and the abandoned, spooky woods are giving him the vague urge to re-enact that scene from ‘Snow White’ where she runs around like a panicky deer and proceeds to collapse face-down and cry. No one’s watching, so he might as well – the overwhelmingly rational part of him knows that no one’s watching, anyway, and the other parts are very neatly repressed, thank you.

And then, out of nowhere, is a perfectly audible voice saying,

“You know what’d be more fun than this?”

He’s learned his lesson from the Schuyler girls, and he’s done with lurking. Aaron neither bolts nor hides this time. He waits.

“Don’t ask him.” groans another voice, with a slight accent. Aaron hears a quiet laugh and the crunching sound of approaching feet on streets as a third joins in.

“I’ll bite.”

“ _Don’t_.”

“What’d be more fun than this, Alex?”

“Literally. Anything. Would be. More fun. Than this.”

“ _Je vous ai dit de ne pas lui demander_ -”

“Well,” says the third voice mock-thoughtfully. “Let’s talk about that. What exactly is it that you dislike about our present situation?”

“John, it’s cold and wet and dark and kinda creepy. Is there anything to _like_?”

“- _Il est en colère et les petites et il aime à se plaindre, et je vous averti-_ ”

Aaron stays perfectly still, his eyes closed, as though if he doesn’t look, if he doesn’t move, they won’t be able to see him. Not that it works, because a few seconds later he hears a sharp inhale of breath as whichever of the disembodied voices is in front comes through a breach in the closest line of trees.

“Shit,” breathes the voice, just audible, and Aaron almost laughs. He manages not to, but if he did it would have been more than slightly hysterical.

Another set of feet crash through the undergrowth to join the first. Whoever they are must be very close, to be so attuned to their friend’s whispers of all things; not in the nurturing, almost cyclic manner of the three girls who’d found Herc, if only because the three voices had been unmistakeably masculine. He thinks of how he and Hercules would lean on each other when the marching and the drills exhausted them and imagines something along those lines happening just to his left, where the voices are. Two boys leaning on each other, surveying the unfamiliar apparition in front of them warily.

It’s too late to pretend they haven’t seen him, so he glances up and turns his head to look as the third member of their little trio appear, batting a branch out of his path. Aaron’s always worn his hair very short – _very professional_ , Theo used to tease, her voice warm – but all three of them have hair that must at least brush their shoulders when not tied up in a ponytail. What he can see of their faces and hands are clean, but the majority of their clothes are worn and dirty. So they’ve been living rough.

They’re not in the same overalls as the sisters, either. And since the British and American militaries wear uniform, and they’re not with the rebels, that only leaves...

Crap.

As Aaron’s blood runs cold, desperately trying to remember of all the rumours he’s heard about the loony extremists, the three boys exchange a loaded glance. The youngest one looks really scared, and the last to arrive keeps making like he’s going to speak, but it’s the first (the leader, Aaron’s pretty sure) who actually goes through with it. His hands go slowly up to either side of his head with his palms open – the universal gesture of _we don’t mean you any harm_. Lying, of course, placating a potentially feral animal, but the sentiment is still vaguely comforting.

“You got a weapon, man?” says the kid cautiously. His hands are still raised. Almost all at once, Aaron realises that he must looked pretty spooked, like he could snap at any moment, and if he actually did have a gun... God, he understands why they’re being careful. Before he answers he does his best to get back the calm mask he used to wear twenty four seven, but it’s long gone. Lost. The only thing that comes of him trying to school his expression is that the third boy grabs hold of the youngest one by the arm and tries to pull him further away from the stranger.

“No,” Aaron replies slowly, taking a deep breath and making himself try a forced smile. “Sorry- no. They don’t give them to the recruits they force to join.”

“Yeah, okay. I’d really love to believe you. Okay? Really-really.”

“Search me, then.” He keeps his voice uninflected, neutral. “I haven’t got anything.”

The kid hesitates to step forward and Aaron sighs slightly. Better to cut to the chase, apparently. “Are you terrorists?”

“What?!”

“No!” yells the youngest, sounding disgusted, and Aaron would be more careful to offend if the constant strain of living in wartime wasn’t wearing down on his sensibilities, grating his nerves away.

“We’re not-” says the third one, more gently, before he cuts off and glances back to the first one for reassurance. They’re both Hispanic, but something in the cautiousness of their interaction suggest to Aaron that they haven’t known each other very long at all. That they’ve been thrown together as suddenly as he and Hercules had been.

“It’s okay.” mutters the leader quickly, and the third one continues with a little more force behind his voice.

“We’re not extremists.”

“Ah, yes,” the little one nods fervently, his ponytail bouncing slightly. “Alex and I, we are both quite atheist, actually.”

“Agnostic.” breathes the quiet one. It’s as though he can’t quite believe that this is happening to him – _where’s he been?_ , Aaron wonders, _everyone else stopped wearing that face after the first couple of months._

“What are you then, rebels?”

The youngest one sort of shrugs while the leaders snaps, “What’s it to you?”

Which Aaron chooses to interpret as a resounding ‘kind of’.

“Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“Sure it is,” snarls the leader, beginning to almost vibrate with anger, and having apparently forgotten his tentative plan to search Aaron. “No, buddy, it’s something to us-”

“ _Alexandre_ -”

“You’re army, right? They conscripted you, or whatever they’re calling it, and you’re running away. I’m not wrong, am I? Because no – and I mean, _no one_ – does anything they’re meant to be doing that shiftily.”

He’s observant, Aaron’ll grant him that. And clearly volatile, if his friends’ unsurprised reaction to his sudden burst of temper is anything to go by, not to mention a force to be reckoned with when you consider that the perceptiveness and the moments of adrenaline seem to work in tandem. _What brilliance could he achieve if someone left him alone with a pen a righteous cause?_

“They tried to grab us too;” he continues easily. “Didn’t really work out for them, but...” As though unwilling to relive the memory, he trails off, then restarts again. “So what were you doing when you ran? Do the military scout now, or are they still moving as a pack?”

“We snuck out of the base.” Aaron offers slowly, not rising to the other boy’s bait. And then immediately catches his mistake and adds a frantic, “I mean- _I_ snuck out.”

“‘We’?”

“You’ve got a friend around here someone?” asks the quiet one, eyebrows twitching upwards.

Aaron kicks himself mentally and nods carefully. “He’s heading for the rebels, I think.”

“But you’re not?”

“It’s not that. We were separated. There was an explosion – and I just wanted to get somewhere safe, even vaguely-”

Aaron presses his lips together and stops speaking, well-aware that he’s already said too much and that all three of them are staring at him with careful eyes, and goddamnit he’s good at this, at surviving, he’s not going to cry. It’s the agony of not knowing more than anything than else that’s getting to him: these kids could try to kill him, they could be lying about not being terrorists, they could sell him back out to the military, they could do anything. But they could also be just as lost as Aaron is, and he doesn’t know.

“Let’s pretend life isn’t shit for a moment,” says the leader slowly, his eyes tired and simultaneously a worrying kind of hungry that Aaron doesn’t think could have come out of their present situation. “And say you don’t haven’t any real alliances, and that we don’t have any real alliances. And that neither of us are evil and none of us have guns.”

‘Guns’, specifically. He’d have to be stupid to miss the implicit threat of knives, or other pointed, deadly weapons. Still, Aaron doesn’t object. There’s a faint suspicion in the logical majority of his brain that if they did have knives, the knives would be pointed at him by now, but he doesn’t bother calling their bluff.

“If you choose come with us, we won’t turn psycho-cannibal in the night and decide to eat you. Promise. Well, I’m not sure about Laf’, but-”

“ _Alex! Je ne suis pas un cannibale!”_

“Fuck this.” Aaron murmurs, not really registering that it’s out loud. “Why not?”

“You’re coming with us?”

“I’m coming with you. And, my name’s Aaron.”

The other boy’s grin is just the wrong side of wild, and almost blinding despite its fleetingness as he grasps Aaron’s hand tight in his own.

“Alexander Hamilton. I think we need to talk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Je vous ai dit de ne pas lui demander-” - I told you do not ask him.
> 
> “-Il est en colère et les petites et il aime à se plaindre, et je vous averti-” - He is angry and small and he likes to complain, and I told you not to ask him.
> 
> “Alex! Je ne suis pas un cannibale!” - Alex! I'm not a cannibal!


	15. Peggy, Eliza, Angelica, Hercules, Maria

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING. I've added the tags, but it's important to me that you guys know this: there's a scene in 'How I Live Now', which is actually quite explicit, where the main character and her six year old cousin find a base where their cousins were forced into the military at. If you've seen it, you know what happens next, and all I can say to you guys that haven't is that this chapter contains gore and horror. I'll put a summary of it in the end notes if you don't want to read that bit - it starts when Peggy mentions the smell.

“Okay. So, were any of you ever prom queen?”

When Peggy had suggested twenty questions, only _fairly_ innocently – she’s thirteen, after all, which may make her the baby of the family, but not an actual baby, and she does have a direct blood relation to Angelica ‘ _Fuck With Me And Die’_ Schuyler – Hercules had initially cringed. As a guy who apparently spent all his spare time sewing and talking about clothes and generally dodging the cis-straight-male archetype set out for him as much as he possibly could ( _good_ ), whatever the comic-book muscles and over-enthusiastic constant slang might suggest, he was a little reluctant to go down the ‘creepy tinder guy’ route of getting to know them. But Angelica had seized the idea delightedly in her talons, and Eliza had smiled sweetly and pointedly not objected, so it’d happened anyway. Peggy couldn’t be happier with the situation. She was only in middle school when the bomb fell: all accounts of Angelica interrogating some unwitting boy she’s heard are second-hand. 

Luckily, Herc seems to be taking it in his stride. They’ve learned that he broke his ankle when he was four, that he was arrested for protesting against U.S. war crimes back in New York (but not charged – and, jeez, shouldn’t all that civil unrest have been a red flag? Shouldn’t someone other than General Washington have realised what might happen next, who might take advantage of it?), and it’s his turn to ask.

“Too young.” she huffs regretfully, beaming up at him as he catches her elbow to steer her around a rabbit hole. Really, it’s silly that Eliza only managed to convince Angie to untie him a couple of hours ago. _Anyone_ could tell that Hercules is just a big softie, even if he did lie about his age to get into the army, or whatever it was that happened. She has a feeling they’re deliberately skirting around the subject.

“Nominated twice, never got it.” Angelica adds, pursing her lips in a way that makes Peggy giggle, because it usually means she’s actually decided to hold back a mean remark instead of just unleashing it.

“I was on the prom committee?” says Eliza hesitantly, and both of her sisters turn on her, disappointed; Peggy sees Hercules rear back slightly as though she and Angelica have suddenly turned into full predator mode or something.

“You were queen when they did that Winter’s Ball thing last year.” Angelica points out, keeping up eye contact, but Peggy just rolls her eyes, not seeing the need for her aggression. Eliza’s only being modest.

“You looked like a _princess_ in that dress, though.” she sighs, swishing the edges of her coat around like the skirts that are apparently far too impractical to wear instead of the Washington-mandated overalls. “Silky and beautiful and elegant and...”

“I bet you did.” agrees Hercules, smiling gently at her sister. Peggy has to bite back a grin: he’s sweet, and maybe he’s flirting, maybe he’s not, but he’s exactly the kind of guy Eliza deserves. Perhaps even the kind of guy Eliza would go for, in a world where she’d let herself be distracted from their immediate survival long enough for that to happen. Angelica’s even keeping out of it and observing Lizzie’s blush in exactly the same way that Peggy is.

“She’s exagg-”

A shrill ringing from her left side cuts her off – it make Hercules’s shoulders jump up suddenly, and Peggy sees his muscles tense so suddenly it must be painful, apparently only because it’s so out of place. There’s no cell reception anywhere in United States, and electricity’s been cut off since the explosion. There should be no phone calls.

“Washington?” she asks, just to make sure, and only maybe a tiny little bit nervously. No one else can call their phone (at least, she _thinks_ they can’t) and no one else would have a reason to, but what if it wasn’t him? What then? And assuming that it is, what does he want? What if something’s gone horribly wrong back at base?

“Yup.” confirms Eliza calmly, even as she frowns slightly and clicks to play the message. The General’s voice is as stern and foreboding as usual, only this time coloured with worry. And slightly tinny from the little speakers.

“ _Elizabeth, Angelica, and Margarita Schuyler, this is General Washington._ ” Peggy is never going to work out why he feels the need to state everyone’s names and ranks at the start of every message. Like, they know each other pretty closely. They know his voice and he knows that she and Eliza hate being called by their full names. “ _We received your message at eleven hundred hours and fifty three minutes this morning, and have been decoding until now. Please reply with your current status and position ASAP. If we have no information from by midnight tonight there will be a force dispatched to find you. It’s- I- I hope very much that you are all okay, and that the prisoner situation hasn’t escalated. Respond to this call as soon as you get it._ ”

The four of them are silent for a moment, Herc’s eyes so wide that Peggy has to laugh at him quietly, as Eliza and Angie consider their commander’s words.

“Aw,” Angelica hums eventually. “He’s doing that thing where he freaks out but bottles it up again.”

“You can hear it if you listen carefully.” Eliza agrees, tucking the phone into her satchel again. “And how are you doing, ‘prisoner situation’? Feel like escalating any time soon?”

Still amused, Peggy rolls her eyes and elbows Hercules good-naturedly, which – him being probably more than a foot taller than her and made out of literal titanium or something, God – he responds to by pretending to stumble away with it.

“Washington can’t have kids.” she tells him, so matter-of-fact that he doesn’t see the point and blinks in confusion for a moment. “He’s got, like, a million adopted kids. And some kind of paternal instinct the size of a small planet because of it.”

“So, what, he’s subconsciously trying to adopt y’all or something?”

“Well,” says Angelica. Her voice is entirely too flat. “Our mom and dad got a whole load of napalm thrown at them, so-”

“Stop talking.” snaps Eliza, and it’s the first time in a long time that she’s that short with either of them, and it’s so surprising that Angelica does as she’s told for once and just stops.

Peggy isn’t sure she likes the soft, pitying way that Hercules is looking at them now. What happened to their home, why they ran, the water, how they ended up in General Washington’s tent – it’s not something they think about, and if they do think about it then they certainly don’t talk about it.

Oh, wonderful. Now he’s going to try and _say something_. He’s building up to it in that totally obvious way that guys have, turning the words over in his mind, and Peggy tries to avoid it as long as possible by letting her eyes fall to her feet as they resume walking. Eliza’ll call the General back in a moment, but they’re close enough back home that it’s not a matter of great urgency: after they decided Herc was trustworthy, they changed their mind about staying still and got packed up as quickly as possible to get moving again.

It’s not that Peggy doesn’t know he means well, that he’s going to try and be comforting. She just doesn’t want him to. It’s only going to make it worse...

On the other hand, though, nothing could be worse than what actually happens.

“Oh, god,” she groans, stopping Hercules before he can start. “What’s that smell?”

Not one of them balks or pauses in their step or freezes up. No one realises.

“Like something small and furry’s gone and fucking died.” Angelica agrees, and then, and only then, do they realise what that might mean. As one, the four of them slow down and stop, Eliza raises her sleeve to her mouth and nose as a kind of filter, and Herc and Angelica – the eldest – exchange a look of fear.

“Where are we?” he croaks, swallowing nervously. It’s a fairly easy path that they’re following now, the lines of someone’s tractor or something straight through a grass field, and they felt confident enough as a group that they haven’t even got a map or a compass out.

“Near Whitehall.”

“There’s a temporary encampment just around that corner.” Hercules says, his voice urgent and fast. “Or, there used to be. Aaron, my buddy, he worked with Montgomery and he saw the charts and stuff.”

“And someone just tried to blitz the whole woods.” breathes Eliza.

Angelica’s the first one to break into a run, Eliza’s the last, but not one of them tries to protest it. The sunshine that Peggy had appreciated earlier feels stifling with her cardigan and her jumpsuit now, she can feel her heart’s thumping acceleration vibrate unpleasantly through her ribcage, and there’s a nauseous feeling of worry/anticipation/anxiety/curiosity growing in the pit of her newly toned stomach. When all this is over, Peggy is going to totally rock a bikini. If. If all this ever ends. If the world goes back to normal enough that it’ll be acceptable for her to chill on a beach with her sisters, Peggy is going to totally rock a bikini.

The camp itself is little more than a series of huge tents. At least, what Peggy can see of it is a series of huge tents, all contained within a concrete wall whose hastily patched-together wooden gate is hanging open on its hinges. The smell is even more intense here; she imagines it seeping out from underneath the pinned down canvas walls.

“Wait here.” Eliza tells her, her newly callused hands brushing over Peggy’s in an attempt to soften the blow.

“What!”

 _No fair._ The injustice of it stings in the corners of her eyes, pricking new tears, and she has to resist the tangible urge to clench her fists and stomp her foot like a little child. Eliza is only a year younger than Angelica and they do everything together, share everything: even when they _try_ to include Peggy she’s just the add-on extra sibling. Buy two Schuyler sisters, get one free.

“It’s too dangerous.” insists Angelica, sensing her distress. “We just don’t want you to get hurt!”

“You can’t just leave me-”

“Hold onto this and stay here, okay?”

The next thing she knows Angelica is thrusting Eliza’s bag into Peggy’s hands, and she’s left helplessly standing next to the gate, alone, the swiftness of this newest abandonment stealing her breath away.

There’s a few seconds of listening to three pairs of boots quickly carrying their owners away from her, a few minutes of shifting impatiently, then as her feet begin to ache with the inactivity, then with nerves. Eventually she just pulls her sweater up to her face to breathe through it – the _smell_ – and worries and hopes in equal measure.

And the unusual stillness of the sunny day is broken, all too suddenly, by an air-rending scream. It’s shrill and desperate and long enough that Peggy had fully enough time to jolt with shock and begin to panic before it ends.

_Herc is so sweet, but what if he was just acting or something and he’s done something awful? What if that’s Eliza screaming? What if it’s Angie? Terrorists could have taken the base, or the British, or it might still be occupied by the army, or, or-_

_But they told me to stay here._

Somehow, it doesn’t occur to her to reach for the weapon in her bag. Instead she just trembles and stares around her for help.

But then the screaming starts again and she snaps, darting through the gate after her sisters and scrambling forward through lines of waterproof green material, until she reaches something of an opening and...

Huddled into a ball on the ground next to what looks like a picnic table is a young woman in a red t-shirt and almost the same military uniform as Hercules ( _the source of the screaming,_ something in Peggy’s brain registers as she glances over her tear-streaked face and horrified eyes), and then just behind her are her sisters and Herc, stricken still in the middle of the bare patch of muddied earth, and then on the other side of this makeshift courtyard is, is...

At first, she doesn’t realise what it is, staring with shaky dread. Piled up like rotten wood, their heads covered with zip-tied plastic bags, what might once have been hands bloated and limply curling out of bloodstained sleeves, are – but – they can’t be-

Bodies. A mass grave overground.

Peggy gags and stumbles forward, and Hercules hurries to catch her again, but this time it is so much less comforting than it had been just a few minutes ago because there are flies in her face, huge carrion flies attracted by that awful, putrid smell.

“It’s, they’re,” stammers the woman, shifting back even further against the table. Her top isn’t red, Peggy hazily realises as she hears herself begin to sob, it’s white and heavily stained from a wound just to the side of her sternum. She looks weak enough to have only just gained consciousness, and certainly too weak to move very far. “They’re coming back, you have to- you have to leave,”

All at once, a roar too painfully reminiscent of the shockwave of the bomb begins just out of sight, and it takes her a moment to work out that it’s not wind at all, it’s something’s engine, something huge; Angelica and Eliza see it first, this huge black shape rising into the air, and begin to run towards them, and there are hands scrabbling for the bag, and someone reaches out for the woman’s hand, and everything’s happening too fast again, too fast and impossible to resist and overwhelming and yet somehow still numb with shock.

This time, it’s Peggy that screams. But the noise is far too loud by that point for any of the others to hear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The sisters and Hercules come across a temporary military encampment that Aaron had told Herc about seeing in Montgomery's chart. The soldiers/kids/officers there have been murdered and their bodies are piled up in the courtyard; Maria (whose name isn't mentioned yet, but it's Maria) is alive but barely conscious, and warns them that whoever killed the others are coming back just they see a plane rising into the air.


	16. Alexander, Lafayette, John, Aaron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate filler. I hate it so much.

It is very, very difficult to resist the urge to cuddle up close to John. Partially this is because they didn’t dare to light a fire and the trees are casting shadows and it’s February, and Alex was born in the Caribbean, and he is _so fucking cold_. Partially it’s because John is still on edge and biting his lip because of it, and it is _so fucking cute_. But, anyway, he can’t; whether or not he’d put it past the ever-tactile Lafayette to try and pre-emptively cock-block him by turning it into a cuddle-pile is moot, because even if that did happen he doubts Aaron would join in, and it would be awkward and unfair in equal parts to leave Aaron in the cold.

There’s a certain social etiquette around physical embraces, of course, which extends even further in warzones. Alex doesn’t know Aaron well enough to seriously consider hugging him – even though John didn’t seem to have any qualms with what was basic comfort cuddling yesterday, but that... Well, that’s different. John hadn’t seen another human face in months and Alex and Laf were still coming off the edge of their earlier _oh my god what if the person in this house is actually a psycho murderer_ panic. It doesn’t count in the same way.

But even beyond social etiquette, Aaron doesn’t seem like he’d appreciate a hug anyway. He’s tall, but he holds himself perfectly upright, like he’s afraid of being seen as too young or too delicate. It’s not like Alex is a stranger to back-aches from sitting stiffly on hard interview chairs, or of using stolen eyeliner to create the impression of stubble, of being an adult. He does actually relax sometimes, though, especially around kids his own age, whereas he’s pretty sure Aaron just... doesn’t.

Surely the guy had friends his own age. But he doesn’t act like he did.

“So, what about you, Aaron?” Alex says, totally out of the blue. He’s self-aware enough to realise that he has a habit of thinking in run-on sentences that bleed into his speech and his writing, meaning that basically a solid chunk of what he says turns out to be a sub-clause or the end half of an imaginary conversation. He is not, however, self-aware enough to stop it.

Lafayette is used enough to Alexander’s A-to-B-via-Timbuktu trains of thought that he just rolls his eyes, John looks at him with something like fascination, and Aaron – as much as he’d probably love them to think he’s some kind of robot – very clearly startles like a man who’s been thrown in at the deep end of the crazy pool.

“What about you?” Alex repeats, quickfire, machine-gun style. “Laf’ and John and I have each other, and that’s something to hold on to, but what about that friend you mentioned? What’s he like?”

Well, as far as Aaron knows, he’s been besties with John since birth. It’s not like that tiny white lie could have offended him, but something clearly has. Alexander regrets asking him immediately – not an unfamiliar feeling – because Aaron is staring at him like he’s overstepped some huge boundary, rather than just making what is Alex’s equivalent of light conversation.

“Hercules.” Aaron says, each and every word a warning that this is _almost_ too far. That any further personal questions won’t be appreciated. “Herc Mulligan. He’s- I don’t know, he’s nice. Likes kids, wants to study textiles, sometimes falls asleep standing up.”

“Did you know him Before?”

Aaron jaw sets hard, his expression turning stony in an instant.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” he grates out. “No.”

“ _Alex, reculer._ ”

“But-”

“Chill.” Laf tells him, with what is either Gallic over-confidence (the word ‘ _bof_ ’, on a constant repeating cycle with ‘ _YOLO_ ’, is what he imagines the inner workings of Lafayette’s brain sound like) or rich stoner over-confidence, and an obnoxiously relaxed stretch. Like a cat. “You told him we were gonna play nice, _Alexandre_. So play nice.”

“Where did you even pick up slang anyway?”

John, helplessly, starts laughing, and Alex has to push down a slight smile under the scowl he’s wearing. It’s his best vaguely parental scowl, the one he uses to forbid Laf from climbing on abandoned supermarket shelves. Alexander may or may not have had any stable parental figures for a long time – unlike whether Aaron and his friend are up to anything shady, though, Alex’s family is _really_ none of anybody’s business, and if it comes up then John and Lafayette better be prepared to hold him back from a fight – but he thinks he has the stern face down perfect. Or maybe Lafayette just can’t be bothered to argue when he knows Alex is trying to help. Whatever.

Laf shrugs, “The internet.” so nonchalantly that Alex actually does crack a smile, and the tension in the air diffuses just a little bit.

“Me and Herc had to share a cell.” Aaron confesses quietly. “It wasn’t like we ‘re enormously close, or anything.”

That’s the biggest, most obvious lie Alexander’s heard since he told himself when he arrived on American that everything would turn out okay – but he doesn’t call it. Instead, he lets the youngest of them take control of the conversation and steer it into calmer waters, chatting to John about some girl called Adrienne that apparently just keep shooting him down in _flames_ every time he tried to ask her out, then kissed him out of nowhere. The story is dumb but funny, and it gives Alex and Aaron an excuse to just stay silent and not-so-subtly study each other (to be honest, Alex is pretty sure John is getting jealous), apart from the occasional sympathetic or sarcastic comment.

“But,” Lafayette says eventually, his voice a little less animated as he concludes. “Then the next day they said that it was the last week of cross-Atlantic flights, because it had become too dangerous, so I had to leave her.”

In the face of that revelation there is nothing but silence. It probably would have passed, given a moment.

If not for the distant rumble that in any other situation Alexander would have called thunder, it would have passed. But – even though the trees have formed an effective barrier between the boys and the sky – it’s easy to tell that today is a clear, blue day. Not one cloud. His first thought doesn’t matter, because he dismisses it so fast that he might as well have just not though it, and then his brain goes to _aeroplane, helicopter, sudden tornado?_ It’s John, scrambling to his feet, voices the horrible, wrong thought anyway.

“Is that a bomb, I- I thought-”

Aaron lurches to his feet unsteadily. “No, it can’t be, the sound is wrong-”

“It’s not the same as...” Alex nods frantically.

“ _Un avion._ ” gasps Laf, as shakily as Alex feels. “ _Quoi d’autre cela pourrait-il être?_ ”

There’s a deafening whoosh, the sort you’d hear at the airport if you were stupid enough to stand on the runway behind a plane. Alex has just enough time to think that Lafayette’s got to be right. And the next thing that any of them know is precisely the kind of noise they had been searching for and praying not to hear, and a volley of dirt and leaves and twigs as the forest beside them explodes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Alex, reculer' - Alex, back off.  
> "Un avion. Quoi d’autre cela pourrait-il être?” - A plane. What else could it be?


	17. The Attack

Maria’s sure that she’s never been in so much pain in her life.

Before the war, or just ‘ _Before_ ’, as people seem to call it, her James used to threaten her with all kinds of things. _I’ll make you suffer_ , he’d hiss, his eyes lit up, and she’d be scared enough to do whatever he said. And yet this is a different kind of pain than his fists had been, not like her body saying _you’re being damaged, make it stop!_ , like her body saying _you’re dying, you’re dying, you’re dying, you're going to die, if you don’t fix this you’re going to die little by little, piece by piece_. It’s strange to think that she had been weirdly relieved when the men from the government had come to ‘evacuate’ her and James, and had instead thrown them into different trucks and taken them to two separate military bases. Finally, finally, she was away from him. Even if ‘away’ meant ‘forced to fight in a war’.

The transfer to the encampment had been intended to be only for about a week, tops. They hadn’t told where they were going next – some of the other ‘recruits’ had tried to question it, but their commanders never did anything but yell and Maria couldn’t help but cringe and obey in the face of raised voices.

When the terrorists broke in she had been in the bathroom: she heard the others running and crying, and she heard all the shots, and she just pressed herself into the corner of the port-a-potty and hoped beyond hope that the murderers wouldn’t find her there.

They did, but only after everyone else was dead. Maria remembers being dragged out, shouting, the casually-aimed, imperfect shot that’s going to kill her. She remembers the extremists tossing her down on the ground near the plastic benches where they ad eaten the day before, and she remembers losing consciousness as one of them laughed that they’ll check if she’s dead yet tomorrow.

(She had wished that she would be by then. The bullet wound hurts _so much_.)

That must have been yesterday, then, because they’re back. When she first startled awake she had forgotten where she was, and she had seen the alarm on the faces swimming in her vision and wondered what was freaking those kids out, and then she had looked past them and seen her colleagues/cellmates/fellow soldiers, what had become of them. And then she had moved her shoulder slightly and felt the horrific pain of the lump of metal and its bloody path just under the collar bone.

So. Two screams.

A little girl dashed through the tents at the sound of them, and the man of the group that had found Maria rushed to stop her from fainting at the sight of – _that_ – and she had remembered why it wasn’t safe to be here.

Now the teenage girl with dark plaits and a blue coat has her arms wrapped around Maria’s waist to keep her upright and the tall girl is babbling into- well, it looks like phone, but it can’t be, and Maria, with the blood-less and the pain and the terror and the noise rushing in her ears, can only whisper, “M’sorry,” inaudibly before she faints again.

*

 _What if I never see France again?_ Lafayette thinks dully as he feels his weight land heavily on his right arm. It’s underneath him as he falls – breaks his fall, actually, but folds in such a way as it does that he realises will mean at least a sprain – and he knows that his homeland is a dumb thing to think of, but he thinks of it anyway. Not a clue why, but, _bof_.

Lafayette has never considered his national identity to be especially close to his heart, as most people in stable countries don’t (except maybe Americans, but that’s a whole other thing), but now that it can’t be taken for granted...

He wants to go home. He wants to see his grandparents again. He wants to see Adrienne, and his friends. He wants to live to see what it’s like to be sixteen, like Alexander and Aaron, or twenty one, or forty.

Time seems to slow down as he thinks; it catches up with him only as soon as he chooses to concentrate on what’s happening.

With little more than a vague awareness that he might never go home and that the others have been bowled over just like him, Lafayette falls, wrenches his arm, cries out, and passes out.

*

Somewhere really, really close to Angelica, Peggy is screaming. She didn’t even realise until she was practically pressed against her sister.

Angie’s pretty sure it’s a basic human instinct thing, the scream, and as her mind begins to compartmentalise, segregate off _what’s happening_ and _what I’m doing_ and _blind panic_ and _what I’m consciously thinking_ , she realises that she can’t let herself do that. No freaking out or freezing up or waiting optimistically for rescue. Even as Herc grabs Peggy to haul her under the closest shelter they’ve got, a tent, as Eliza pulls that poor woman up by her outstretched hand and clumsily applies pressure to her wound as though they’re not both just trying to stumble out of the way of Impending Doom, Angelica is grabbing inside the satchel.

Not for the gun. What would be the point in that? If the people on the attack planes (and it is plane _s_ multiple, she knows that) have seen them, if they decide to bomb them, a tiny pistol won’t do anything to stop it from happening. All they can do is try, as quickly as possible, to call for help.

*

It would probably be self-important of Aaron to think that the bombings are being aimed specifically at him.

Still, though.

Best to ignore the issue of whether or not his paranoia is just pushing the bounds of normal and healthy or totally breaching them, however, considering the more pressing issues. Namely the fact that, for the second time in so many days, he is lying face-down in the dirt with a headache, unsure of how long it’s been since the actual explosion that knocked him there.

When he rolls over he sees Alex helping John to his feet, both of them concentrating anxious gazes on Lafayette’s uncomfortably twisted body.

But when he opens his mouth to speak, he’s cut off by the rapid, all-consuming thump-thump-thump of an aircraft.

 _Again_.

The least he can do is warn the others.

*

There’s too many people moving, too many things happening for Eliza to keep track of. In the split second that Herc had turned towards Peggy, Angelica had gotten some idea into that genius head of hers and was sprinting forwards, and Eliza wondered what would happen to this brave woman on the ground who had tried to help them if she didn’t save her.

“Come on, come on,” she whispers hurriedly, not even really realising she’s doing it as the words bleed into each other with fear. “Come, I’m going to help, we’re going to help you, up, up-”

When Eliza tugs her to her very unsteady feet the woman makes a choked off noise like what Eliza can only imagine is what a person must sound like when they draw their last breath, and she panics, thinks _I can’t let you die_ , and presses one hand to the scarlet epicentre of blood on the woman’s chest.

In front of them, yelling so loudly into the satellite phone that Eliza can actually make out words above the racket, Angelica is braced against a tentpole to keep her upright in the face of the wind.

“Washington! This is Angelica – we’re under attack – the extremists, and – just by Whitehall, loads of tents, you can’t miss – they’re attacking us! And Hercules says there are other kids in the woods, other targets –”

*

“John! John!”

John’s not moving. Laf is... Alex checks, and finds with breathless relief that he’s unconscious, but his heart is still beating and his lungs are still pumping air.

But John and Aaron are just strewn on the ground like broken toys and all he can think of is the hurricane, and everything that he had seen that day. The memory is almost worse than the reality he’s living: people trapped, dead or dying, under the wreckage of their houses; people and animals face-down in the floodwater; the ‘lucky’ few wandering around like aimless, mindless zombies, wailing for their loved ones.

The sky had been- the sky here is still a bright blue, and it’s that that allows him to divorce himself from his past. Just before the hurricane struck his island the clouds had turned yellow, and the sky had been so full of clouds and, later, the dust from the debris, that it had stayed that way for days.

No, no, no, don’t think about that. The skies here are blue, and Lafayette is okay, and John is going to be too. Also Aaron won’t be dead.

“John!”

When Alex half-collapses onto the ground next to him and shakes him, John’s eyes flicker open. They’re half-clouded – but they’re open. _He’s alive._

“I thought you said it wasn’t a bomb.” John mumbles hazily, dong nothing to lift himself onto his feet but accepting the arm dragging him upwards with what appears to resignation.

“Wasn’t.” Alex shoots back, unable to resist. “It was a plane that _dropped_ a bomb. Possibly more than one plane.”

“Oh.” Disorientated, John takes a moment to blink, perhaps leaning on Alexander a little more than technically necessary. “Is Lafayette alright?”

“I think he is, he-”

“ _Run,_ ” comes a urgent, hoarse whisper from behind them, and Alex whirls to see Aaron up on his elbows, staring up at the previously clear sky with horror, his eyes focused on-

No. Hold on. That’s not a plane, and it’s neither a terrorist vehicle nor a government one.

Which is irrelevant, obviously, because _it’s descending on them._

*

Peggy can’t breathe. She can’t think. All she can do is let Herc push her out of the way, crumpling to the floor as he does, and let Angelica snatch the phone.

“Washington! Washington- work, fuck it, call him, _fuck_ \- Washington!”

“We’re gonna die.” Peggy hears someone say. Their voice is weak and thin and childish and _hers_. She’s the one, still half-crying, that’s saying it, but she can’t stop. She almost feels too terrified to even cry. “We’re gonna die. We’re gonna die.”

Eliza is helping the injured woman towards shelter as quickly as she possibly can, always the caring sister; Angelica is signalling for aid, logical and smart; Hercules is poised protectively to defend them; and Peggy is...

Pathetic.

 _If I get out of this_ , she promises herself, swiping the tears away from her face and letting her shaking fingers find the shape of the gun’s handle in the bag. Despite what’s happening, the sobs wracking her, she thinks she manages to point it upwards fairly steadily. _If I get out of this, I’m never going to let it happen again._

*

“-shington!” comes a high, distorted voice from the radio. James nearly falls out of his seat where he’s perched, more than slightly nervously, on one of the comparatively luxurious folding deckchairs inside the General’s tent. Washington had told him to sit in and help him with organising some papers and monitoring the radio, and he’d been pretty sure he could deal with that. Paperwork is easy. Writing’s easy. Especially without Thomas in the room to distract him.

Trying to listen to a transmission that’s so full of crackling static that it’s barely audible isn’t quite so easy, even though James has his ear pressed right to it, pen scribbling down what he can hear of Angelica’s message, and come to think of it... no, that’s not static. It’s something else.

“I think they’re under fire.” he babbles, his tone probably too sharp for addressing the General. It doesn’t seem to matter. “The loony extr- I mean, terrorists, are attacking them.”

“Where?”

Washington’s current expression is to his face what stormclouds are to the sky, and it takes a couple of seconds of floundering and stammering for James to work up the courage to reply to it.

“She said near Whitehall, and something about a forest and tents, and that there are more kids in the woods, in danger.”

“Stay there.” Washington barks. He stands up so suddenly that his makeshift desk jerks back, and James with it. “Call her back, tell her we’re coming.”

“Sir, you can’t be going with...”

When the General turns around to glare at James he trails off helplessly. He wishes he didn’t, but you can’t really disagree with Washington when he’s in one of those kinds of moods.

“I _am_ going to get them. To safety. Permanently.”

*

Hercules is done. Done with this shit.

Somehow, he’d thought when he escaped from Montgomery’s base that that would be the end of it, and that after he and Aaron had gotten out they could just keep walking until they reached the revolutionaries, and then... don’t know. World peace through brutal violence, hopefully.

It looks like they’re skipping out on the world peace but still getting the brutal violence full force, which is really just all kinds of unfair.

He sees Peggy fall to the ground with something not unlike detachment, knowing from a glance and from all his school fights that she’ll be fine, and tries to keep himself between her and the attack plane like a shield as Angelica starts yelling into that wacked up fucking walkie-talkie. The odds of getting out okay aren’t in their favour, he knows that: a badly wounded girl, a terrified kid, one weapon between the five of them. Getting the rebels over here won’t be enough, he realises, and tries to shout it over the howling wind.

“We need to move! We need to get away!”

Below him, Peggy’s fingers close around the handle of their gun. Ahead, Angelica yells, “Washington!”

*

_It’s my fault._

Washington can’t escape the thought, trapped alone with it on the inside of the helicopter as they tear over the woods, echoing around his head with the sound of the blades through the air. And he knows it’s not the whole truth: the Schuyler sisters had been free to choose whether or not to volunteer their help, and it was hardly his decision for the war to happen in the first place.

It’s just that none of them would be in this specific situation if not for him sending them to scout. What if it was Patsy, or Jack, out there fighting for their lives? What would he be doing then?

Exactly what he’s goddamn doing right now is the answer. He never knew Philip Schuyler personally, and he knows that if the man was still alive he’d be fighting on the other side, but it’s something about the girls and their lost military father that makes him think that they could so, so easily be his kids. The parallels are all there.

(Washington doesn’t think about whether or not fragile Patsy would cope as well as Angelica and Eliza and Peggy if she wasn’t already in Canada. He really doesn’t. Because he doesn’t want to know the answer.)

 _It’s my fault those children are in danger_ , whispers that horrid little voice again, and Washington steadies his resolve. _But I can get them out too._

“There!” he calls to the pilot, catching a glimpse of movement between the trees they’re flying over. Someone shakily standing up, pulling a friend and-

They’re not the Schuylers, but Angelica did warn them of other kids in the forest alone. And these are kids, and they are alone.

*

While it would be really lovely for John to be able to say that he’s not having one of his enormously fun, paralysing panic attacks, that would be lying. The weird thing is that he always used to get these in the face of his father’s anger, but Henry Laurens is either very far away or, more probably, dead, which John is trying very hard not to be relieved about because Dad would only be making this worse. It’s probably horrible to think that. He’s probably a horrible person for it. But he knows that Alexander and Lafayette will at least try to watch out for him, whereas his father, who could only ever look at him and see someone who was Hispanic and gay and liberal, who only refrained from disowning him for the sake of their public image, most probably would not.

Another good argument for Dad’s absence being a positive here is that, no matter how many PR-mandated ‘family’ activities he dragged John and his other kids on, the guy wouldn’t be caught dead in a helicopter. _Death traps_ , he’d huff, as self-assured as he was in all things. _Couldn’t drag me on one if my life depended on it._

The tables have fucking turned, haven’t they? Because there’s a helicopter right in front of them, half-cutting down the trees, and John’s pretty sure that his life _does_ depend on getting into it or not. Whether the guys on it will shoot him or save him.

“That’s-” he hears Aaron stammer, then cut off in apparent awe as a stone-featured, grave-looking older guy in a tidy uniform leans towards them from the door, one hand extended in offering like in that painting. Everyone knows the one: with the young man and the bearded one who’s probably God. John would have loved to study art, but his father had said it was a ‘pussy subject’ (verbatim) and forbidden him, so he doesn’t know the name. He’d taken history instead.

Something about the determination in the latest stranger’s stormy brow makes John think that maybe they’re making history right now.

“Get in!” yells the man over the din. When the three of them – minus Lafayette, who is still sprawled on the floor – hesitate, he gestures hurriedly. “They’re still bombing here! You have to-”

Another impact seems to shake the very air only a couple of hundred feet away, and, well, that makes the decision for them. Aaron wraps his arm around Laf’s waist, Alex grabs John’s arm to make sure he won’t fall, and one by one, shaking, they run towards what is either escape or murder.

He can’t help but wonder hazily, as his feet clang against metal and he half-collapses, _and what now?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was that understandable? I don't know. Who knows.
> 
>  
> 
> Also! The show I'm in is running this week. So I'm gonna have even less free time than usual, which means that not failing classes gets priority over fanfiction, which means that the chances of the next update being on time are... very, very small. Don't worry, though - the end is nigh is a good way!


	18. Angelica and Washington

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are more people than Washington and Angelica in this chapter. Just too many for me to put them all in the title is all :)
> 
> Also! Warnings for disassociation, and mentions of the whole gratuitous violence thing.

There are moments in time that are sort of temporal no-man's-lands. Between one event and the other, areas that obviously exist but are rarely thought of, never talked about. The space between the wars.

It begins when the plane flies away, - either not seeing them or deciding that they're too helpless to even bother killing - after the woman collapses and Eliza cries out in alarm, and Herc yells that they have to run. But they can't. They can't run.

This is the location that Washington is coming to find them at ( _hopefully_ ), and the more they move, the smaller the chances are of him finding them, and the smaller the chances are of them surviving at all.

For the length of the moment between real time, they are huddled in a ditch behind one of the tents, unable to move very far around the camp but desperate to be away from the horror in the courtyard. Peggy allows Angelica to take the gun out of her hands without protest - gratefully, even, pliable and limp - and lets Eliza press her hands down to the older girl's wound so she can wrap it; Hercules gets the phone shoved at him, and Angelica sharply tells him, "Listen. And wait."

They never do get a reply.

Long seconds pass, then minutes, and then almost hours, but not one of them is able to do anything but ritual movements, completely paralyzed with fear. Angelica can feel her heartbeat in her bones; way too fast, of course, and saturated with adrenaline beyond the point of no return, impossible to slow. Every time they hear the far-off _BOOM_ of an explosion in the woods it spikes again.

In the end, it's Hercules that speaks.

"Angelica." he says, voice cautiously lowered in reverence of the tense silence and the threat hanging in the air. "I think someone might be trying to get through to us. It's just not coming out clear."

Just as carefully, she leans towards him and the phone. Now that she's not listening to the air and waiting, searching for the sound of approaching destruction coming closer and closer like a child trapped in a thunderstorm, the faint buzzing is easily audible. It's not a random pattern – or at least, she doesn’t think it is. It’s spaced into syllables of sibilance, almost audible words.

“Washington?” she whispers, only just remembering to press down the button to transmit. “Are you there?”

The hissing cuts out in shock, then redoubles, and Angelica shakes her head at no one in particular.

“We can’t hear you.”

“A-Angie,” stammers Eliza, looking up from her bandaging. “I think she’s getting worse. She needs a doctor.”

Of course she needs a fucking doctor, she was _shot-_

No. Can’t be snappish, can’t be mean, can’t be rude to her sisters. They have to stick together, now more so than ever before, and that means that she can’t be a bitch no matter what. Except that ‘bitch’ is such a ridiculously sexist term that she can’t believe she just thought it, that in the end of society itself she’s letting society’s programming get to her, and, ugh-

Good. Anger focusing somewhere else.

She takes a deep breath and speaks into as the phone as calmly as she can.

“One of us is down, Washington. We need medical care. We need to get out of here.”

The buzzing peters out, and she’s not sure if she’s relieved or terrified by it. What if that last burst of static was him crashing? What if it was him giving up their case as too risky and turning to go the other way?

The moment of unreality stretches longer; Angelica wonders, vaguely, if they’ll die here. Will anyone ever find their bodies if they do, or will they be left to rot like those other poor souls?

“In the sky.” murmurs Peggy. She’s thirteen, and her hands are stained red with the blood of a dying woman who can’t be more than a decade older than her, and her hair is still neatly up in the childish pigtail it had been in when she burned their breakfast yesterday morning. The image is jarring, especially considering the blank detachment on her face that can’t be healthy at all. Angelica worries about it so much that she only registers her sister’s words a second later.

“What?”

“Up there.” she says again, more firmly. “There’s- something.”

Along Peggy’s line of sight is a little black dot against all the blue, propelled by whirring blades nearer towards them, and when she’s concentrating she can see it clearly, make out that it’s one of the rebels’.

More relief than she’s ever felt in her life, relief that floods her senses and weakens her knees, hits Angelica like a tidal wave.

The second the helicopter touches down, the moment of in-between ends.

*

“Go, go, go!”

It’s the pilot’s voice, nervous and eager to leave even as they begin to touch down, and Washington turns to glare at him. The man should know that those girls have been through hell, that one of them is injured – who it is and how bad it is not yet apparent, and he’d love to say that the agony of not knowing isn’t burning a hole in him, but it is – and they won’t even be able to move that fast.

He’s about to put that thought to words. Before he can, though, he’s interrupted.

“Would you cut it out?!” snaps the shorter of the conscious boys, the last vestiges of his ponytail giving up the ghost and flying around his lean face. His eyes are furious, even more so than his words. “They’re _hurt_.”

Washington raises one deliberately inscrutable eyebrow at the child to shut him up. Almost immediately, he backs down, which is curious considering his behaviour-

Although it might just be because the Schuyler girls are stumbling towards them as fast as possible with a fourth, unmoving figure propped up on their shoulders. He’s caught between horrified happiness that it’s not one of them that’s hurt, not one of the armada of children that he shouldn’t think of as his own but does and can’t help it, and disgusted guilt at himself for being glad. And then suddenly alarm as a young man hurtles around a corner after them, the satellite phone that Washington had given Eliza in one hand.

A whole load of things happen at once. The teenager with the freckles glances out of the window on the other side of the helicopter to the open door and physically recoils from whatever he sees there, gasping “ _Oh my god_ ,”; the muscular young man behind the sisters notices Washington reaching for a weapon and throws his hands up, breathlessly shouting, “I’m with you! Don’t shoot, sir, I’m on your side, I’m with you!”; the tall, shaven-headed boy they’d found in the woods spots the young man in question and yells, “Herc!” at the top of his lungs; Peggy Schuyler makes a wordless little cry and throws herself towards Washington, he just thinks _damn it all_ , forgets the chaos around them, and drops the gun to catch her.

“You’re going to be okay.” he mutters. Now, no one objects when the pilot curses violently and all but drags them into the air at top speed as soon as the doors are closed. Two of the boys from the woods (the tall one is busy hugging the boy who had been with the Schuyler sisters) have knelt on either side of the wounded girl, talking frantically over each other about CPR and resuscitation. Peggy is in his arms. Eliza and Angelica are holding each other and he thinks shaking. The rescued boys in their army uniforms are whispering in quick, hushed voices and sending unsubtly apprehensive glances Washington’s way. The curly-haired younger one is still in the corner where they had propped him up with a blanket, eyes closed.

“You’re going to be okay.” he repeats, louder, and this time to all of them. Those awake enough to freeze all collectively freeze. “I’m pulling you out of this, and the rest of the under eighteens in our camp, too. We’ve scouted out a number of safe-houses within reasonable distance – you’ll remain there for your own security.”

They all try to pretend that it doesn’t make them as happy as it does: Washington can tell. Angelica, Eliza, that boy with the angry eyes, they’ll claim they want to fight, but what price has the young woman on the floor paid for that? Or Peggy? Or the barely-alive teenager knocked unconscious by a bomb that didn’t, _couldn’t_ , discriminate between sinners and saints and victims of circumstance?

Washington uses his best _no arguments_ voice and keeps speaking.

“We’re going to go to camp to sort out any injuries and gather supplies. Then you’re leaving. Understood?”

There’s a hesitant chorus of ‘Yessir’s and ‘Yes, General’s, and he feels Peggy nods against his chest. In the corner, the curly-haired boy stirs and moans faintly, and the driven one runs to him with a loud cry of, “Laf!”.

Maybe, just maybe, they’ll let him save them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only a day late, and only one left!


	19. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> LOOK AT WHERE WE ARE  
> LOOK AT WHERE WE STARTED  
> I KNOW I DON'T DESERVE YOUR COMMENTS  
> BUT HEAR ME OUT: I LOVE YOU ALL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also! This last chapter is dedicated to snap_crackle_spock for their kind bookmark!

The house is nothing like what John had thought it might be. He’s not entirely sure what he was expecting – an armoured metal bunker? a suburban townhouse? – but it sure wasn’t the empty, looted shell of a lonely-looking cottage. Maybe cottage isn’t the right word, considering the three floors, but it somehow just seems like a cottage.

Someone was clearly living in it not too long ago, but only as a temporary measure. Still, John wonders whether whoever it was meant to leave behind the stale bread or the mouldy sleeping bag in the middle of the living room, and whether Eliza notices the ominous dark stain on its underside that speaks as to their possible fate before she burns it. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference if she did, because the whole bonfire thing is to make sure that there isn’t anything they could catch from the trash left in there anyway. She’s very careful – if they let her, she would burn most of the furniture, but Alexander puts up a fight over the couch, arguing that there’s no point wasting it if it doesn’t have roaches, and the beds stay because they’ve got to sleep somewhere and the admittedly broken frames are mostly repairable. But everything else is incinerated to the best of their ability. Even if they choose to believe the rumours that tap water is safe to drink again (they don’t: Washington, in his uniquely magnanimous and intimidating way, gave them a bin-bag full of the tablets that make it safe), there’s a risk of cholera, or tuberculosis, or any other number of diseases that sound like they belong in the nineteenth but could still kill them.

It didn’t take that long for the injured woman from the encampment to recover once given a blood transfusion (Hercules had stayed with her while she was unconscious, let her grip his hand hard enough to almost bruise when she did come to consciousness; not like waking from sleep, like escaping from an airless box, with choked gasps and desperate words of _wh-where am I- Maria, my name is Maria, where-_ ) but in that time they were asked by a commander with a slightly campy German accent and soft eyes to please wait for her, so that they won’t have to risk too many journeys back and forth from the safehouse. It’s only about a week.

What John does then is stays fairly quiet and learns. Lafayette and Aaron and Herc all have to get themselves checked out for minor brain damage from the explosions, and he knows from his brief argument with Alex that making assumptions isn’t going to do him any favours, so he does his best to educate himself about the kids around him. From a skittish mess of a boy he thinks is named Maddy he learns that the three girls the General of the entire fucking rebellion flew into the middle of a blitz to rescue are sisters, and that their dad was in the army too. From the Schuylers themselves he learns that they love fiercely, and that they’re prepared to take on anything for each other. From a loud girl called Dolley who shares their tent he learns that they all have nightmares about losing their sisters.

By watching, John learns that Alexander is totally down to fight literally anyone, anytime. He learns from seeing a tall, obnoxious guy with a fairly impressive afro fall on his ass that this extends to people he barely knows as well. From that same incident he learns that Washington’s cheerful German inspector general – “Steuben,” he smiles easily. “But call me Fred.” – has as much of a capacity to be terrifying as Washington does.

He learns that Aaron actually does have opinions when he overhears him telling Herc that he doesn’t want to stay in a safehouse for the rest of the war, however long that is. “We’ve all got people.” he’d said, something strangely like desperation in his voice. “As in, people we’ve got to find. You’ve got Hugh, and I’ve got Theodosia, and I bet everyone else does too. I can’t just spend my life wondering what happened to them.” And John turns and walks away before either of them notice him, consumed for the first time since he met Alex and Laf with thoughts of his family.

Eight days after the attack and the helicopter, Steuben shows eight antsy teenagers and a young woman into a jeep and drives them two hours north with several suitcases worth of supplies. Dolley Payne, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and a couple of younger kids go west, and other little bunches of scouts and assistants gather themselves up and let Washington send them away to relative safety.

It’s not easy at first. They clear the shell of the house and burn the junk inside, and Steuben leaves, and only then does a new kind of life begin to grow.

*

John and Alex’s room is characterised mainly by the turtle that John impulsively draws huge on the wall with charcoal, driven partly by a sort of kenophobia of the blank walls surrounding them – there had been paintings, but the glass on the frames was smashed so they had to be thrown away – and partly by boredom. Alex called dibs on the twin beds then defeats the purpose by pushing them together so that they can conserve body heat at night. Things tumble out of control from there, cuddling and kissing first in the dark on their own, then in the daylight, then in front of others. He thinks that they’re probably boyfriends, and that the happiness that lights him up whenever he thinks of Alex’s laugh is probably love, but doesn’t bother asking or telling anyone anything. They’re alone here; what they are is uncomplicated and peaceful for the first time since- well, ever, and the world doesn’t need to know what they are to each other. _They_ know. And that’s the only thing that matters.

Without anything but his friends around him to remind him that he’s a million miles from home, Lafayette blossoms. He bickers happily with Peggy about planting flowers instead of vegetables, writes terrible French poetry on the floor, washes the poetry off the floor, pesters Herc into showing him how to sew, teaches himself to cook mainly through trial and error.

Hercules and Peggy work tirelessly on the house. He lifts furniture around, usually colliding with half his housemates on the way, and repurposes their uniforms for curtains and throws. She coaxes grapevines into climbing up the front of the building when summer comes, glares windowsill beans and cress into submission, observes the progress of her potatoes with the patience of a saint. Both of them keep a never-ending to-do list on scraps of paper and material and their arms and _whatever_ , half of it short term things like ‘water the tomatoes’ and half of it further off like ‘get proper firearms training’. John gets the impression that they’re not looking for an outcome so much as a sense of purpose.

It’s Angelica that (with some enthusiastic help from Alexander) wants to record their experiences of the war. The recently rediscovered legal pad that must have fallen under the couch before the bomb even went off fills, gradually at first, with spidery handwriting and the details of everyone’s identities and lives After. She looks to the future, not with the same careful hope as the rest, but with a calculated knowledge of how all of this will be treated, and how the victors will choose to remember their suffering and the suffering of other kids like them if they don’t make the facts of it clear in black and white.

Aaron stays true to the words John knows he wasn’t meant to hear. In a list of hostages recovered from the retreating British army he hears the name _Theodosia Bartow_ , doesn’t appear to outwardly react, and then the next day has packed up his things and is ready to disappear off to find her. Previously to that, though, he seems relaxed in the house. If you wandered into an empty room Aaron would probably be in there with one of the eight children’s books that had been in a cardboard box under the sink (that they’ve all read over and over) or napping with something covering his head. He doesn’t actively join in Angelica’s project – he doesn’t resist when she questions him, just never offers information not asked for – but when he goes he takes a copy of his few pages folded up in his pocket ‘just in case’ and silently hugs every one of them.

Maria haunts the base of the stairwell opposite the front door like she’s desperate to know she isn’t trapped, and every time it opens she flinches at the noise, relaxes at the glimpse of freedom, and goes back to hugging her knees where she’s perched on the bottom step. This doesn’t go on for very long – still long enough for Alexander to start getting twitchy and worried and overly curious, of course – because there’s an almost infinitesimal shift in the atmosphere one day, and Eliza appears like an angel of benediction and kindness. It’s not immediate, but it’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quick. Later that night, when John and Alex head upstairs to go to sleep, they see Eliza cuddle in close to her, see Maria rest her head on the other girl’s shoulder, and they get silent smiles from both of them – but Maria’s smile says _I’m too tired to be afraid anymore_ and Eliza’s says _Here Be Dragons._

*

That’s not where it ends. The house is secluded enough that they never get a land vehicle close enough to see their little murals and plants and homemade curtains (so twee that John almost laughs, sometimes) but aircraft zoom over them too fast to be identified properly. Those are the days when people forget that they’re essentially trapped together, when Alex and Aaron scream at each other about some stupid detail of politics that doesn’t matter because the government _doesn’t exist anymore_ , when Herc talks about getting rid of a wall with a face that makes you think he’s going to punch through it, when Peggy and Angelica stutter to a standstill in their work, when Lafayette finds some excuse to lock himself away and sulk. All John can think is thank god for Eliza and her endless kindness, even if the monopoly game had ended with threats of murder from all parties.

More people come, and most of them leave, but not all. A thin little girl stumbles over the brim of the hill one day and eats three entire bowls of Lafayette’s (frankly, disgusting) stew before she whispers that her name is Sally, refusing to look back at where she came from and mumbling only something along the lines that the water got her cousins. Perhaps it’s that she’s so little – eleven, she shrugs, then says maybe twelve? Depending what date it is? And Alex, who’s seen real poverty before, shakes his head grimly and murmurs _she’s lying, she’s younger than that_ to no one in particular – but nobody’s really surprised when Angelica gets her best harpy face on and swoops Sally under her wing; the kid learns to kill a grown man with a bobby pin and perfects the precursor of a glare that will _annihilate_ the egos of teenage boys one day. And she’s safe and happy, after a while. And everyone else manages to be too.

It’s not perfect, and they spend a long time that way. There are times when John is, miraculously, on his own, and can’t help being reminded of being alone in his house right at the start of the war – but this is a million miles from that.

In a few months, the electricity will flicker back on without warning or explanation. Washington’s face will appear on the currently defunct TV, and his voice will start a calm speech from the radio that they were just using for a white noise machine, and the water will run truly clean without the need for filters or tablets. They’ll yell at each other so no one misses it, and cry, and one by one realise that the war is really, finally over, and that they won’t have to fight for their happiness anymore. That there’ll be no more looking over their shoulders for enemies, no more panicked flights through the woods, no more waiting in isolation for the end.

No more wondering _is this where it gets me?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Frodo voice: It's over! It's finally over!  
> For my mental image of Baron von Steuben, whom I know about only from his Wikipedia page, see /this/ video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ckUVLwnFfU (a track my dad plays whenever he's driving my friends anywhere, so as to confuse them and establish social dominance).  
> Washingdad is just Too Busy to properly parent, unfortunately. We do have Big Sister(TM) Angelica to prevent a Lord of the Flies re-enactment though.  
> I would love to write a sequel, I just genuinely don't know what I'd write in it (maybe epistolary from Laf? who knows?) so please please give suggestions down in the comments.  
> And, finally, to the people who have followed this for ages and ages: You are all beautiful, beautiful nerds. <3

**Author's Note:**

> You know where the title's from. Alternately titled: In Which I Will Probably Regret Posting An Unfinished Draft (Again) and Know Nothing About American Geography At All


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